Having recently read a few books set over fairly short timespans, I thought it might be interesting to put together a list of books set over a period of a single day or night. Interestingly, the literary genre seems to be best represented here (with Joyce and Solzhenitsyn coming immediately to mind), but quite a few other genres are represented to. Do you have any 24 hour notables to add to this list?

Graffiti Moon by Cath Crowley (see our review)

Blurb: It’s the end of Year 12. Lucy’s looking for Shadow, the graffiti artist everyone talks about.  His work is all over the city, but he is nowhere.  Ed, the last guy she wants to see at the moment, says he knows where to find him. He takes Lucy on an all-night search to places where Shadow’s thoughts about heartbreak and escape echo around the city walls. But the one thing Lucy can’t see is the one thing that’s right before her eyes.

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After Dark by Haruki Murakami (see our review)

Blurb (from Goodreads): A short, sleek novel of encounters set in Tokyo during the witching hours between midnight and dawn, and every bit as gripping as Haruki Murakami’s masterworks The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and Kafka on the Shore. At its center are two sisters—Eri, a fashion model slumbering her way into oblivion, and Mari, a young student soon led from solitary reading at an anonymous Denny’s toward people whose lives are radically alien to her own: a jazz trombonist who claims they’ve met before, a burly female “love hotel” manager and her maid staff, and a Chinese prostitute savagely brutalized by a businessman. These “night people” are haunted by secrets and needs that draw them together more powerfully than the differing circumstances that might keep them apart, and it soon becomes clear that Eri’s slumber—mysteriously tied to the businessman plagued by the mark of his crime—will either restore or annihilate her. After Dark moves from mesmerizing drama to metaphysical speculation, interweaving time and space as well as memory and perspective into a seamless exploration of human agency—the interplay between self-expression and empathy, between the power of observation and the scope of compassion and love. Murakami’s trademark humor, psychological insight, and grasp of spirit and morality are here distilled with an extraordinary, harmonious mastery.

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Ulysses by James Joyce

Blurb (from the Vintage edition): Set entirely on one day, 16 June 1904, “Ulysses” follows Leopold Bloom and Stephen Daedalus as they go about their daily business in Dublin. From this starting point, James Joyce constructs a novel of extraordinary imaginative richness and depth. Unique in the history of literature, “Ulysses” is one of the most important and enjoyable works of the twentieth century. After its first publication in Paris in 1922, “Ulysses” was published in Great Britain by The Bodley Head in 1936. These editions, as well as the subsequent resettings of 1960 in Great Britain and of 1961 in the US, included an increasing number of transmission and printing errors. In 1977 a team of scholars, led by Professor Hans Walter Gabler, began to study manuscript evidence, typescripts and proofs in an attempt to reconstruct Joyce’s creative process in order to come up with a more accurate text. This edition uses the revised 1993 text of Gabler’s version.

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Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist by Rachel Cohn and David Levithan

Blurb: It all starts when Nick asks Norah to be his girlfriend for five minutes. He only needs five minutes to avoid his ex-girlfriend, who’s just walked in to his band’s show. With a new guy. And then, with one kiss, Nick and Norah are off on an adventure set against the backdrop of New York City—and smack in the middle of all the joy, anxiety, confusion, and excitement of a first date. This he said/she said romance told by YA stars Rachel Cohn and David Levithan is a sexy, funny roller coaster of a story about one date over one very long night, with two teenagers, both recovering from broken hearts, who are just trying to figure out who they want to be—and where the next great band is playing. Told in alternating chapters, teeming with music references, humor, angst, and endearing side characters, this is a love story you’ll wish were your very own. Working together for the first time, Rachel Cohn and David Levithan have combined forces to create a book that is sure to grab readers of all ages and never let them go.

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Fear Nothing by Dean Koontz

Blurb: Christopher Snow suffers from a rare genetic disorder – xeroderma pigmentosum – which means his skin and eyes cannot be exposed to sunlight, so his life begins at midnight. Set in the town of Moonlight Bay, a place of picturesque beauty and haunting strangeness, Fear Nothing is a startling and compulsive masterpiece of tension.

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One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Blurb (from the Vintage Future Classics edition): The Gulag, the Stalinist labour camps to which millions of Russians were condemned for political deviation, has become a household word in the West. This is due to the accounts of many witnesses, but most of all to the publication, in 1962, of “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich”, the novel that first brought Aleksandr Sozhenitsyn to public attention. His story of one typical day in a labour camp as experienced by prisoner Ivan Denisovich Shukhov is sufficient to describe the entire world of the Soviet camps. The original text was first published in the Soviet journal “Novy Mir”, during the Khrushchev ‘thaw’. However, in the rush to bring out the first translation, the novel was significantly diminished. The idiosyncratic language of the protagonist – a man of peasant origins and no formal education – the colloquialisms and prison-camp slang were inadequately rendered; dense, elliptical syntax was smoothed over; earthy dialogue vanished into euphemism. Moreover, the novel, published in the Soviet Union for avowedly political reasons, was received abroad almost exclusively as a political sensation. With this new translation, however, the full measure of the work’s artistic achievement can finally be gauged.

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The Ice Harvest by Scott Phillips

Blurb: It is Christmas Eve in Wichita, Kansas and snowing steadily. The streets are deserted, traffic is light and most people have returned home for the start of the festivities. But family get-togethers are the last thing on Charlie Arglist’s mind, and home is the last place he needs to be. For Charlie has to get out of town. For good. In nine and a half hours, to be precise. But first there are just a few things he has to do…”The Ice Harvest” is a rollercoaster ride of double-cross, black humour and, very possibly, the last twenty-four hours in Charlie Arglist’s life…

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The Night my Sister Went Missing by Carol Plum-Ucci

Blurb: A tiny pistol, passed from friend to friend at a party on an abandoned pier, suddenly fires – and Casey Carmody falls into the water below. Kurt, Casey’s older brother, endures a seemingly endless night at the police station while the coast guard searches for his sister and his friends are questioned, one by one. Was the gunfire accidental or deliberate? Or was the whole drama one of Casey’s practical jokes? And where is Casey – or her body – now?

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This is Shyness by Leanne Hall

Blurb: A guy who howls. A girl on a mission to forget. In the suburb of Shyness, where the sun doesn’t rise and the border crackles with a strange energy, Wolfboy meets a stranger at the Diabetic Hotel. She tells him her name is Wildgirl, and she dares him to be her guide through the endless night. But then they are mugged by the sugar-crazed Kidds. And what plays out is moving, reckless…dangerous. There are things that can only be said in the dark. And one long night is time enough to change your life.

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The Forging of the Shadows by Oliver Johnson

Blurb: The first in a science-fiction trilogy traces the battle of three champions of the forces of the God of Light against Lord Faran Gaton, the terrible High Priest of the God of Darkness.

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Strangers at the Feast by Jennifer Vanderbes

Blurb: On Thanksgiving Day 2007, as the country teeters on the brink of a recession, three generations of the Olson family gather. Eleanor and Gavin worry about their daughter, a single academic, and her newly adopted Indian child, and about their son, who has been caught in the imploding real estate bubble. While the Olsons navigate the tensions and secrets that mark their relationships, seventeen-year-old Kijo Jackson and his best friend Spider set out from the nearby housing projects on a mysterious job. A series of tragic events brings these two worlds ever closer, exposing the dangerously thin line between suburban privilege and urban poverty, and culminating in a crime that will change everyone’s life.

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Blurb: Nancy Harmon has a new home, a loving husband and two beautiful children. The thing is, she’s had all this before …Seven years ago she escaped from a volatile marriage and the devastating deaths of her first two children. Now, she’s trying to start afresh. The accusations. The newspaper stories. The blame. That’s all behind her. Or so she thinks. For someone has not forgotten. Somebody who is determined to bring the terror and the pain hurtling back. One cold morning, Nancy leaves her children to play outside – but when she returns, they have disappeared. With growing terror, she realises it has begun again …

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The Infinities by John Banville

Blurb: One long, languid midsummer’s day, the Godleys gather at the family home of Arden to attend their father’s bedside. Adam, the elder child, and Petra, only nineteen, find that relations with their mother, Ursula, and their dying father, old Adam, are as strained as ever. Adam’s relationship with his wife, Helen, seems too on the brink of collapse and Petra, fragile and deeply troubled, finds deepest relief in her own pain. The gods, those mischievous spirits, watch silently, flitting through this dark menage. Unable to resist intervening in the mortals’ lives, they spy, tease and seduce, all the while looking upon the antics of their playthings with a mixture of mild bafflement and occasional envy. Old Adam – husband, father and esteemed mathematician – has made his name grappling with the concept of the infinite. His own time on earth seems to be running out, and his mind runs to disquieting memories. Little does he realize, as he lies mute but alert in the Sky room, that the gods are capable of interposing themselves in the action, and even changing time itself when it pleases them. Overflowing with a bawdy humour, and a deep and refreshing clarity of insight, “The Infinities” is at once a gloriously earthy romp and a delicately poised, infinitely wise look at the terrible and wonderful plight of being human. In electrifying prose, Banville captures the aching intensity, the magic and enchantment, of a single midsummer’s day in Arden.

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The New House by Lettice Cooper

Blurb: ‘All that outwardly happens in The New House,’ writes Jilly Cooper in her Persephone preface, ‘is over one long day a family moves from a large imposing secluded house with beautiful gardens to a small one overlooking a housing estate. But all the characters and their relationships with each other are so lovingly portrayed that one cares passionately what happens even to the unpleasant ones. ‘The New House, first published in 1936, reminds me of my favourite author Chekhov, who so influenced Lettice’s generation of writers. Like him, she had perfect social pitch and could draw an arriviste developer as convincingly as a steely Southern social butterfly.’ ’It is tempting to describe Rhoda Powell, the 30-plus, stay-at-home daughter of a widowed mother, as Brookneresque,’ wrote the reviewer in the Guardian, ‘even though Lettice Cooper wrote this wonderfully understated novel several decades before Anita Brookner mapped the defining features of quietly unhappy middle-class women.’ While Kate Chisholm in The Spectator described Lettice Cooper as ‘an intensely domestic novelist, unraveling in minute detail the tight web of family relations’ but one who is also ‘acutely aware of what goes on beyond the garden gate. The exposé of a family under strain because of changing times is curiously more vivid and real than in many novels about family life written today.’

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Saturday by Ian McEwan

Blurb: Saturday, February 15, 2003. Henry Perowne is a contented man a successful neurosurgeon, the devoted husband of Rosalind and proud father of two grown-up children. Unusually, he wakes before dawn, drawn to the window of his bedroom and filled with a growing unease. What troubles him as he looks out at the night sky is the state of the world the impending war against Iraq, a gathering pessimism since 9/11, and a fear that his city and his happy family life are under threat. Later, Perowne makes his way to his weekly squash game through London streets filled with hundreds of thousands of anti-war protestors. A minor car accident brings him into a confrontation with Baxter, a fidgety, aggressive, young man, on the edge of violence. To Perowne s professional eye, there appears to be something profoundly wrong with him. Towards the end of a day rich in incident and filled with Perowne s celebrations of life s pleasures, his family gathers for a reunion. But with the sudden appearance of Baxter, Perowne s earlier fears seem about to be realised.

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The Weight of Silence by Heather Gudenkauf

Blurb: It happens quietly one August morning. As dawn’s shimmering light drenches the humid Iowa air, two families awaken to find their little girls have gone missing in the night. Seven-year-old Calli Clark is sweet, gentle, a dreamer who suffers from selective mutism brought on by tragedy that pulled her deep into silence as a toddler. Calli’s mother, Antonia, tried to be the best mother she could within the confines of marriage to a mostly absent, often angry husband. Now, though she denies that her husband could be involved in the possible abductions, she fears her decision to stay in her marriage has cost her more than her daughter’s voice. Petra Gregory is Calli’s best friend, her soul mate and her voice. But neither Petra nor Calli has been heard from since their disappearance was discovered. Desperate to find his child, Martin Gregory is forced to confront a side of himself he did not know existed beneath his intellectual, professorial demeanor. Now these families are tied by the question of what happened to their children. And the answer is trapped in the silence of unspoken family secrets.

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A Single Man by Christopher Isherwood

Blurb: A gay man copes with the death of his partner in Isherwood’s classic novel, now a film written and directed by Tom Ford.

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The Statistical Probability of Love at First Sight by Jennifer E Smith

Blurb: Today should be one of the worst days of seventeen-year-old Hadley Sullivan’s life. She’s stuck at JFK, late to her father’s second wedding, which is taking place in London and involves a soon to be step-mother that Hadley’s never even met. Then she meets the perfect boy in the airport’s cramped waiting area. His name is Oliver, he’s British, and he’s in seat 18C. Hadley’s in 18A.

Twists of fate and quirks of timing play out in this thoughtful novel about family connections, second chances and first loves. Set over a 24-hour-period, Hadley and Oliver’s story will make you believe that true love finds you when you’re least expecting it.