In the coming weeks we will be reviewing Rainfall and Bullets by Herbert Cook Jr. The crime thriller is set in a Honduran town takes place in one night. The relentless pace of stories like Rainfall and Bullets got the B3 team thinking- what other novels or works of fiction were set in one night or one day?
Attempting to jarring and jog our collective memories, we came up with some notable works set in a single day, night or 24 hours. Mrs Dalloway is possibly the most famous work, the story of Clarrisa Dalloway as she prepares for a party in a pre-First World War London. Mrs. Dalloway is considered by many to be one of the greatest novels of the 20th century.
Followed close behind by is Ulysses, following James Joyce’s character Leopold Bloom wander through Dublin in one day.
There are other noted books set in a single night or day, like A Single Man, Ian McEwan’s Saturday, A Christmas Carol and Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.
So, we ask you, what are your favorite books set in a short amount of time? Are they on our list? Or perhaps there is another work that keeps the story within 24 hours or less? And what makes these tight stories so compelling? Is it the constriction of time and intensity of story? What do you think?
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