On the Calculation of Volume II

Solvej Balle
Translated by Barbara J. Haveland

The second volume of the landmark European masterpiece about a woman lost in time.

Format
Ebook
ISBN
9780571383412
Date Published
04.03.2025
Delivery
All orders are sent via Royal Mail and are tracked: choose from standard or premium delivery.

Summary

Tara Selter is searching for a way back into time.

A year has passed, but Tara still wakes up to the same newspapers, and the same blank faces when she explains that she has seen this all before. Until one morning, she boards a train and finds herself in a new day. It is still the eighteenth of November, but the faces are different, the weather is colder.

She realises that she has found a way out of her endless autumn. By moving across Europe rather than through time, she can collect the ingredients for the seasons: the thin film of ice on puddles, the fresh spring breeze, the blazing summer sun. As she travels, she begins to hope for a new future, one that will run in parallel to the eighteenth of November, one that she must build for herself.

Shortlisted for the International Booker Prize and Winner of the Nordic Council Prize for Literature, On the Calculation of Volume II is the second volume of the poetic, page-turning European masterpiece about one woman’s fall through the cracks of time.

‘Absolutely, absolutely incredible.’
Karl Ove Knausgård
‘A total explosion.’ Nicole Krauss
‘Unforgettable.’ Hernan Díaz
‘Breathtaking.’ Chetna Maroo
‘Brilliant.’ Jon McGregor
‘Absolutely marvellous.’ Lauren Groff

Critic Reviews

What the best novels can do is open up spaces. And she has opened a space in time, and it is absolutely, absolutely incredible. I think it’s a fantastic book.

Karl Ove Knausgård
Critic Reviews

Solvej Balle is a prodigious writer who, miraculously, finds the subtlest, most fascinating differences in repetition. You have never read anything like On the Calculation of Volume. This unforgettable novel is a profound meditation on the lonely, untranslatable ways in which each one of us inhabits time—and the tenuous yet indelible traces we leave in the world. Day after day.

Hernan Diaz
Critic Reviews

A total explosion; Solvej Balle has blown through to a new dimension of literary exploration.

Nicole Krauss
Critic Reviews

A masterpiece of its time.

Nordic Council Literature Prize Jury

SolvejBalle

Solvej Balle was born in 1962 and made her debut in 1986 with Lyrefugl (Lyrebird.) She went on to write one of the 1990s’ most acclaimed works of Danish literature, Ifølge loven (1993) (‘According to the Law: Four Accounts of Mankind’, translated by Barbara Haveland.) On Calculation of Volume is Solvej Balle’s return to literary stardom after nearly 30 years.

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SolvejBalle

Solvej Balle