On The Calculation of Volume (vol.1) by Solvej Balle

The first book I finished this year could well be a candidate for my Best Books of 2026. Wonderful to be off to a strong start!

I’m definitely behind the curve, so forgive me if you already know all about this book – in 2024, I saw so many people writing about On The Calculation of Volume by Solvej Balle, published in 2020 and translated from Danish by Barbara Haveland. It is going to be a seven-volume series, with six published in Danish and three out so far in English. And all of those seven volumes take place in one day.

Fear not, this is not a Ulysses-style novel where a single day is stretched out across thousands of pages. Because while all the action takes place on 18 November, there are many different days: Tara Selter, our narrator, is stuck in a timeloop.

Balle makes the decision not to start the novel with the first loop. Ever since Groundhog Day, we are used to watching or reading the protagonist struggle through the initial confusion – staggering through all the stages of grief, really, from disbelief to bargaining to despair. It is so apt for the tone of On the Calculation of Volume that we start on day 121. The first sentence could be chilling – ‘There is someone in the house’ – but we quickly learn that it is simply Tara’s husband, Thomas, doing his daily rounds of boiling a kettle, finding tea leaves, making a cup of tea. Every day, she lies awake in the spare bedroom, hearing the normality of his routine.

We do, of course, learn more about the initial whirr of the timeloop. The confusion, when Tara wakes up on 18 November when it should be 19 November. The various attempts to break out of the trap, and the repeated explanations she makes to her husband each day. But there is something peaceful and calm about this opening that seeps through the whole of the novel. This is not a woman in a state of panic.

I have an hour and a half in the house before Thomas gets back. I have time to have a bath or wash some clothes in the sink, I have time to take a book from the shelf and sit down with it in one of the armchairs by the window.

If I spend the time in the living room, I usually listen to music or read until it starts to get dark, but today I am staying in here, in the room overlooking the garden and the woodpile. I heard Thomas take his coat off the peg and I heard him leave the house. I opened the door into the hall, the packages are gone from the floor, and now I am sitting at the table by the window. It is the eighteenth of November. I am becoming used to that thought.

I am not the first to say it, but what makes On the Calculation of Volume so special is Balle’s resolutely feminist, domestic take on the strange, quirky genre of the timeloop novel. In some many examples, the device is used in a fable of power. The hero is trapped, and must escape. The hero might even be hunted without the timeloop, trying to avoid a murderer. He might be facing an ethical bargain with some unseen arbiter of the timeloop – if only he makes the right decisions, he can reassert dominance over time.

But not here. Tara is, it seems, at peace. Her marriage is loving, a meeting of minds – and, indeed, business partners, running a rare books company together. And there are elements of the timeloop device that seem to cater to this calmness. Tara does not restart each day in the Paris hotel room where she initially awoke on 18 November – rather, she begins wherever she ended the previous iteration of 18 November. For weeks, she does this in bed with Thomas, and has to start each day with an explanation (which, incidentally, is always believed). By Day 121, she has decided to live in a kind of isolation in the spare room. Later in the novel, she tries other forms of created domesticity.

Unlike so often in the genre, it never feels like Tara is at war with the timeloop. Rather, she is finding space within it. This a rich, beautiful novel that celebrates and inhabits the domestic on every page.

I don’t think it was an act of will, but slowly and almost imperceptibly I managed to extend my sense of neutral, indefinite morning. I concentrated it, intensified that pale-gray awakening and with each morning I found it possible to carry that sensation with me further into the day. After only a few mornings I could hold onto the moment long enough for it to encompass everything in the room around me: the bed linens and Thomas’s body beside me, the wall behind the bed and the wardrobe on the other side of the room, a chair with clothes on it, the morning light, the faint sound of a chimney flue door rattling in the wind. These are familiar sounds and sensations and it is still an ordinary morning, it is spacious and open, and I lie in bed while fragments of the world drift in and dissolve: a brief riff of birdsong, a blackbird defying the gray skies or a robin singing into a pause in the rain, three or four notes to start with, then six or seven, then eight, and each one as it burst forth dissolving in my fog.

I keep using similar words – domestic, calm, peaceful, beautiful – and these are the things that make On the Calculation of Volume so special. What Balle has achieved in one book is extraordinary. I bought the second as soon as I finished the first, and I will join the throngs eagerly awaiting the books appearing in English. An unusual masterpiece.