Which is your favourite: books set all on one day or books that span a character's
whole life? These are two of my favourite literary devices so I've got loads of
recommendations of each. And one of the most famous examples of a book set all
on one day is Ulysses by James Joyce. This book is set in Dublin and all takes
place on the 16th of June, which happens to be my birthday, but is more famously
known to James Joyce fans as Bloomsday, named after Leopold Bloom, the main
character in Ulysses. And Ulysses is a very bizarre novel. Tt's one of those
that a lot of people have on their bucket list as a book they want to read at
least once. It's a very modernist book, it follows Leopold Bloom throughout
the course of this very ordinary day, and it really foregrounds the process of
thinking. And as you might guess from the title, it is a very loose adaptation of
The Odyssey by Homer. So classics fans will enjoy spotting
those little parallels. The most common genre where you might expect to find
books set all in one day is thrillers, because this device is great for
building tension. So a really scary book I loved is A Window Breaks by C.M. Ewan.
And this is about a man called Tom whose family have just gone through a series
of terrible things: their teenage son was recently killed in a car accident and
their teenage daughter was attacked and mugged. So to give the family some time
to recover and bond as a family, they go away for a night to this remote house in
Scotland. But in the middle of the night Tom is woken to the sound of someone
breaking in, and the rest of the book all takes place on that one night as Tom
tries to keep his family safe from the intruders. But there's also this much
bigger mystery we're uncovering. Or a very different kind of book that uses
this, not a thriller though equally tense, is Summerwater by Sarah Moss. So this is
set in a Scottish cabin park, the kind of place people might rent for a holiday,
all on one long rainy day. And each chapter is told from the perspective of
a different character, so we see them all observing each other and making
judgments about each other. So this is very much a post Brexit novel. It's
really looking at the attitudes that have been allowed to fester in this
country ever since then. And it's a very foreboding novel, the book keeps hinting
at some devastation that's to come by the end of this day, and so really
captures that feeling of inevitability that a lot of us have been feeling, that
all of this tension and hatred must be leading us to some sad and dangerous
place. But at the same time Sarah Moss is such a brilliant character
writer. All of these characters feel a hundred percent real and so then even
amongst all of this tension there is this real sense of kinship, even as we
can be cruel to each other. And then a book set over an even shorter period of
time is The Dinner by Herman Koch. So this is all set over one meal. Two brothers,
one of them a famous politician, and their wives come together for this very
fancy five-course meal to discuss something terrible that their sons have
done. So the book is structured around the five courses, but as the meal goes on
the book gets darker and darker and so do the decisions that the characters are
making. So we do learn what the sons have done and it is awful, but maybe even
worse is the response that the parents are having. Everyone in this book is a
dark, unlikable, hard to relate to character which definitely makes this a
divisive book, but I think makes it a fascinating one as well. And then for the
last of my all in one day book recommendations, just to show that you
can use this structure in a more lighthearted way as well,
I have a romantic young adult book: The Sun is Also a Star by Nicola Yoon. So
this book is about two teenagers, Natasha and Daniel, who meet just randomly on the
streets of New York one day, just 12 hours before Natasha and her family are
due to be deported back to Jamaica. And the book is told from each of their
perspectives, as well as getting many perspectives from loads of side
characters, ones whose lives might intersect with theirs just for a split
second, so it all comes together to paint this picture of fate and the universe
bringing things together in the right place at the right time. So it's very
cheesy and cute and shows just how many ways you can use that all in one day
plot device. And then we have the books that do the total opposite books, that
span the whole lives of their characters. So a much talked-about book that does
this is A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara. This is the story of four
young men: Jude who's the main character, and his three closest friends. And Jude
is this very sad troubled character. His past is slowly revealed to us, years of
trauma which now lead him to self-harm. There is a lot
of potentially triggering content in this book that's worth pointing out and
it's a very very sad book, but it's also one of my favourites because in between
all of the terrible things that happen you get these lovely moments of
tenderness between the characters. So that even though there aren't any neat
happy endings, or moments of justice for the people that mistreated Jude, it is
still a hopeful novel even while being so sad. And another really interesting
thing about this book is how completely timeless it is. There are absolutely no
references to wars or historical events or presidents or anything that could
allow you to put a time on it, but things like mobile phones and the internet
exist the whole way through, even back when Jude is a young boy. So it's totally
removed from time, and kind of allows you to forget how much time is actually
passing. But a very different approach is taken by John Boyne in The Heart's
Invisible Furies. This book is very much rooted in the time periods that it
passes through. So each chapter of this book checks in with our main character
Cyril in seven year time jumps, starting with meeting his mother when she's
pregnant with him, all the way up until he's an old man. And this again is a very
sad book, a lot of sad things happen, but it's also a very funny book, there is a
lot of dark humor in here. And Cyril is a gay man born in Ireland and so each time
we jump forward seven years we see the changing attitudes to gay people in that
time period. And as he gets older he starts to travel as well, so we see
Amsterdam in the 70s and New York in the 80s, the total opposite to A Little Life.
And it's so rooted in time and place. The next book I'm gonna recommend I have
talked about quite a bit on Book Break recently but it's just too perfect not
to include, and that is A Whole Life by Robert Seethaler. So this is a very short
book even though it spans such a long time. It's about a man called Andreas who
lives his whole life in the Austrian Alps, and almost never leaves at all. And
he leads this rather quiet life defined by two major events that happen.
One when his wife dies and one when he leaves to fight in the war. But the book
is just as much about the small moments in between that make up a life, and his
relationship with the nature around him. It's a really beautiful book. Another
super popular example of these whole life novels are the Neapolitan novels by
Elena Ferrante. So starting with the first book,
My Brilliant Friend, Elena Ferrante wrote four novels about the lives of these two
best friends Lila and Lenu, growing up in this very poor and often rather
violent neighborhood in Naples. And it is a series of four books but the author
herself has said she always considers it just one book published serially.
And these books are partly famous because they are so beloved, and partly
famous because of the speculation around the author Elena Ferrante's true
identity. She's always been open about the fact that her name is a pseudonym
but that she doesn't want to reveal her true identity, and yet some journalists
seem to have made it their life's work to uncover who she really is. I think we
should obviously respect her privacy and just enjoy these stories about this
difficult and often rather toxic friendship between these women, but one
that is nonetheless incredibly deep and important to both of them. And then
finally just to subvert this, Time's Arrow by Martin Amis is a novel told
backwards, as in time literally moves backwards in the book. People might walk
backwards into a hairdresser with short hair and come out with long hair. Our
narrator is this kind of unknown consciousness who's been placed into the
body of someone at the end of their life and watches it play out backwards. And
for a long time he can't make sense of their actions. He's been put into the
body of a doctor whose patients arrive well and leave ill, but as we go further
and further back in time we reach the one terrible moment in our modern
history when suddenly this reverse chronology makes more sense to us than
what really happened. And it's again a really short book for one that takes
place over such a long time. I think people can sometimes be put off from the
idea of reading a book that covers a character's whole life because they
think they're gonna have to read 700 pages, which is true in A Little Life but
I promise it's worth it, but actually isn't true for a lot of these other
examples. So I would love to know which of these two literary devices you prefer.
Do you like books set all in one day or do you prefer to follow a character
through their whole life? And please do give me your recommendations for both
because I absolutely adore both of these. And I will link a playlist here with
loads more videos full of reading recommendations for you to browse
through and we'll see you next time!