Staff Picks
Circadian Rhythm - Single Day Books
- Sara M.
- Tuesday, May 21, 2019
Collection
Some books take place over weeks, months, even millenia (I'm looking at you, James Michener.) Others are set in a far shorter period of time. Enjoy this list of books, long or short, that take place over the course of a single day or less!
Rose Sees Red
Published in 2010
In the 1980s, two teenaged ballet dancers--one American, one Russian--spend an unforgettable night in New York City, forming a lasting friendship despite their cultural and political differences.
Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist
Published in 2008
High school student Nick O'Leary, member of a rock band, meets college-bound Norah Silverberg and asks her to be his girlfriend for five minutes in order to avoid his ex-sweetheart.
A Christmas Carol
Published in 2009
A miser learns the true meaning of Christmas when three ghostly visitors review his past and foretell his future.
The Dinner
Published in 2013
Meeting at an Amsterdam restaurant for dinner, two couples move from small talk to the wrenching shared challenge of their teenage sons' act of violence that has triggered a police investigation and revealed the extent to which each family will go to protect those they love.
Sick
Published in 2013
Brian and his friends are not part of the cool crowd. They're the misfits and the troublemakers-the ones who jump their high school's fence to skip class regularly. So when a deadly virus breaks out, they're the only ones with a chance of surviving. The virus turns Brian's classmates and teachers into bloodthirsty attackers who don't die easily. The whole school goes on lockdown, but Brian and his best friend, Chad, are safe (and stuck) in the theater department-far from Brian's sister, Kenzie, and his ex-girlfriend with a panic attack problem, Laura. Brian and Chad, along with some of the theater kids Brian had never given the time of day before, decide to find the girls and bring them to the safety of the theater. But it won't be easy, and it will test everything they thought they knew about themselves and their classmates.
Embers
Published in 2002
Publisher description: In a secluded woodland castle an old General prepares to receive a rare visitor, a man who was once his closest friend but who he has not seen in forty-one years. Over the ensuing hours host and guest will fight a duel of words and silences, accusations and evasions. They will exhume the memory of their friendship and that of the General's beautiful, long-dead wife. And they will return to the time the three of them last sat together following a hunt in the nearby forest--a hunt in which no game was taken but during which something was lost forever.
Forgive Me, Leonard Peacock
A Novel
Published in 2013
A day in the life of a suicidal teen boy saying good-bye to the four people who matter most to him.
Today Will Be Different
A Novel
Published in 2016
Eleanor knows she's a mess. But today, she will tackle the little things. She will shower and get dressed. She will have her poetry and yoga lessons after dropping off her son, Timby. She won't swear. She will initiate sex with her husband, Joe. But before she can put her modest plan into action-life happens. Today, it turns out, is the day Timby has decided to fake sick to weasel his way into his mother's company. It's also the day Joe has chosen to tell his office-but not Eleanor-that he's on vacation. Just when it seems like things can't go more awry, an encounter with a former colleague produces a graphic memoir whose dramatic tale threatens to reveal a buried family secret. Today Will Be Different is a hilarious, heart-filled story about reinvention, sisterhood, and how sometimes it takes facing up to our former selves to truly begin living.
The Statistical Probability of Love at First Sight
Published in 2012
Hadley and Oliver fall in love on the flight from New York to London, but after a cinematic kiss they lose track of each other at the airport until fate brings them back together on a very momentous day.
The Light of Day
Published in 2003
Former London police detective George Webb, "booted off the force" for trying in all the wrong ways to put away the right man, is now a private investigator specializing in matrimonial cases. He has crossed a line with a client, wholly upending his own life. By the close of this remarkable novel, which unfolds over the course of one day in George's life and mind, we will know him intimately from his childhood secrets to his fall from grace as a cop. In its slow and revelatory accumulation of physical and emotional detail, The Light of Day illumines the ambiguities at the heart of the most profound and inexplicable human emotions: fear and hate, love and desire.
Mrs. Dalloway
Published in 1993
Overview: Mrs. Dalloway chronicles a June day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway-a day that is taken up with running minor errands in preparation for a party and that is punctuated, toward the end, by the suicide of a young man she has never met. In giving an apparently ordinary day such immense resonance and significance-infusing it with the elemental conflict between death and life-Virginia Woolf triumphantly discovers her distinctive style as a novelist. Originally published in 1925, Mrs. Dalloway is Woolf's first complete rendering of what she described as the "luminous envelope" of consciousness: a dazzling display of the mind's inside as it plays over the brilliant surface and darker depths of reality. This edition uses the text of the original British publication of Mrs. Dalloway, which includes changes Woolf made that never appeared in the first or subsequent American editions.