Day-Long Novels: A Reading List

In Honor of Bloomsday, Five Books That Take Place Over a Single Day

June 16, 2015  By Literary Hub

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In honor of Bloomsday—our annual and reverent celebration of James Joyce’s account of just another day in Dublin—we asked the staff at Kramerbooks in Washington, DC, to suggest some other fine books that take place over the course of a day.

Molly Fox’s Birthday, Deirdre Madden

Madden’s novel is set in Dublin, with clear allusions to the peripatetic Leopold Bloom. The unnamed narrator spends time in the home of her friend, the famous actor Molly Fox. As the narrator, a playwright, goes about her day she reflects on her life; she remembers her first meeting with Fox while making breakfast, she contemplates her friendship with a now very famous TV personality as she visits the market, and she imagines her future while doing the dishes.

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Nobel Prize winner Solzhenitsyn drew upon his own first-hand experience in the Soviet gulag system to pen this account of one prisoner’s fairly ordinary day. The novel focuses on the minute victories and setbacks that constitute daily life in the gulag, where hope is indeed a dangerous thing, and survival is, above all else, the ultimate goal. Its publication led, in part, to Solzhenitsyn’s eventual expulsion from the Soviet Union.

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