Everything takes place over a few hours, or entirely set during the immediate aftermath of an automobile crash, for example?
I’d like to avoid “and it was all a dream”, time travel, or similar plot devices if possible.
I’m curious what a novel of any length purposely confined to a strict time window in-story reads like.
Maybe I should be reading more plays.
Thanks.
The Children’s Story by James Clavell.
IIRC, the book takes about 20 minutes to read and the events that take place occur in real time.
@Varyk How short a time are we talking?
This one might be a bit of a cheat, but: The 7½ Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle by Stuart Turton. Technically everything happens within a day.
10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World — Elif Shafak.
Other people have already said Ulysses and Mrs Dalloway, both modernist classics that take place in a single day. There are a couple of other examples of similar novels, but the only one that springs to mind right now is a deeply annoying experimental ‘novel’ called Fidget by Oliver Goldsmith, which I don’t recommend at all. He wore a tape recorder and spoke out loud describing everything he did that day, then transcribed it all and that’s the book. If you do decide to read it, don’t say I didn’t warn you.
I don’t know if this will count for you, but there’s a hypertext novel called 253 by Geoff Ryman which IIRC takes place over just a couple of minutes, with very short chapters describing the thoughts of each of the 253 passengers on board a train. He did later also publish a print version.
Try the classical Greek tragedies—one of the requirements of the genre is that the action is supposed to take place in less than a day (Aristotle’s “unity of time”).
