On the Calculation of Volume (Book V)

Pub Date: 11/17/2026

It's been a while since Tara Selter was all alone in her repeating November day. It's been even longer since she was one half of a unit called T&T Selter, an antiquarian book dealership she ran with her beloved husband Thomas. Her hazy days of confusion are behind her, and so are her desperate and doomed attempts to reattach herself to linear time. Tara has begun to settle into a new life, with new habits, and new people, and so have the many other time-trapped individuals who have joined her along the way. And yet we can't help but wonder whether she and her fellow travelers will ever find their way out of a trap so inexplicable and profound--and will they even still want to? 

In Balle's hands the time loop becomes a parable of loss, longing, marital loneliness, and our own mortality. With gradual, breathtaking power, Balle deftly explores a series of existential and philosophical questions, and grapples with the form of the novel itself, charging full steam ahead in reinventing and reinvigorating its possibilities. And now we've arrived at the thrilling fifth book of Solvej Balle's septology. "It's a sensation." ( The New York Times Magazine).

Solvej Balle, born in 1962, made her debut in 1986 with the novel Lyrefugl, and went on to write the highly acclaimed According to the Law: Four Accounts of Mankind (praised by Publishers Weekly for its blend of "sly humor, bleak vision, and terrified sense of the absurd with a tacit intuition that the world has a meaning not yet fathomed"). She has also published a book on aesthetics, a political memoir, and two books of short prose. On the Calculation of Volume heralds the arrival of a major literary artist.


Jennifer Russell is a translator living in Copenhagen. Together with Sophia Hersi Smith, she has translated fiction and poetry by Danish writers such as Tove Ditlevsen, Marianne Larsen, Olga Ravn, and Rakel Haslund-Gjerrild.


Sophia Hersi Smith is a translator living in Copenhagen. Together with Jennifer Russell, she has translated fiction and poetry by Danish writers such as Tove Ditlevsen, Marianne Larsen, Olga Ravn, and Rakel Haslund-Gjerrild.