Recent & Remarkable Book Club: "On the Calculation of Volume (Book 1)"

The Recent & Remarkable Book Club is devoted to reading modern literary fiction worth talking about. From award winners and international sensations to cult favorites and future classics, we'll explore some of the most compelling books of the past decade.

This month, we’re reading On the Calculation of Volume (Book I). The story follows Tara Selter, an antiquarian bookseller who finds herself trapped in a temporal anomaly: each morning, she wakes to the same date, November 18. While the world around her resets endlessly, Tara alone remembers what has come before. As days accumulate into months and years, she must grapple with profound questions about time, identity, loneliness, memory, and what gives a life meaning when the future disappears. Both philosophical and intimate, inventive and emotionally resonant, On the Calculation of Volume transforms a familiar time-loop premise into a remarkable meditation on routine, love, and the nature of change.

We will meet in person in the loft at our store at The Mark, 117 S. Pineapple Ave. The book club is $15.95, which includes a copy of On the Calculation of Volume to be picked up at Bookstore1 any time before our meeting.

Solvej Balle (b. 1962) made her debut in 1986 with Lyrebird and went on to write one of the 1990s’ most acclaimed works of Danish literature, According to the Law: Four Accounts of Mankind (1993), which was published in more than ten countries. Following this, she moved from Copenhagen to the small island of Ærø, where she wrote a book on art theory, a political memoir and four works of microprose and founded the publishing house Pelagraf. Nearly thirty years later, the first book of a planned septology, On the Calculation of Volume, was self-published. Six books have been published in Danish so far, with translations underway in over 30 countries.