List of novels, the action of which takes place within 24 hours

While in drama the Unity of Time prescribes that the action of a play is to take place during a single day, the novel as a rule covers a much longer period of time. There are, however, some notable examples where the time narrated is only one day. The most prominent example is James Joyce's "Ulysses", a novel which in one way or another has influenced the genesis of other novels whose action takes place within 24 hours.

A special category can be established for novels told in retrospect (Conrad's "Heart of Darkness" and Graves's "Claudius" novels, for instance), though such an exercise eventually comes to include so many first-person novels as to become too cumbersome to be of much use.

*Gilbert Adair: "The Act of Roger Murgatroyd"
*Chinghiz Aitmatov: "The Day Lasts More Than a Hundred Years"
*Manlio Argueta: "Un día en la vida"
*Nicholson Baker: "The Mezzanine" and "Vox"
*Frédéric Beigbeder: "Windows on the World"
*Saul Bellow: "Seize the Day"
*Chetan Bhagat: "One Night @ the Call Centre"
*Sandra Birdsell: "Children of the Day"
*Heinrich Böll: "Billiards at Half-Past Nine"
*Louis Bromfield: "Twenty-four Hours"
*Dan Brown: "The Da Vinci Code" (excluding the epilogue), "Angels and Demons" (excluding the epilogue), "Deception Point" and "Digital Fortress"
*Steven Carroll: "The Art of the Engine Driver"
*Angela Carter: "Wise Children" (excluding the narrator's memories)
*Michael Cunningham: "The Hours" (three plots each taking one day)
*Rachel Cusk: "Arlington Park"
*Don DeLillo: "Cosmopolis"
*Stephen Dobyns: "Cold Dog Soup"
*Friedrich Dürrenmatt: "Die Physiker"
*Gustav Ernst: "Grado. Süße Nacht"
*Richard Flanagan: "Death of a River Guide"
*Henry Green: "Party Going" and "Concluding"
*Mohsin Hamid: "The Reluctant Fundamentalist"
*James Hanley: "No Directions"
*Elina Hirvonen: "That He'd Remember the Same"
*Christopher Isherwood: "A Single Man"
*James Joyce: "Ulysses"
*Stephen King: "The Colorado Kid"
*Dean Koontz: "Odd Thomas"
*Hanif Kureishi: "Intimacy"
*John Lanchester: "Mr. Phillips"
*David Llewellyn: "Eleven"
*David Lodge: "The British Museum Is Falling Down"
*James Lovegrove: "Days"
*Malcolm Lowry: "Under the Volcano"
*Ed McBain: "Killer's Wedge"
*Ian McEwan: "Saturday"
*Lawrence Miles: "This Town Will Never Let Us Go"
*Merriam Modell (writing as Evelyn Piper): "Bunny Lake Is Missing"
*Brian Moore: "I Am Mary Dunne"
*Haruki Murakami: "After Dark"
*Garth Nix: "Several books in The Keys to the Kingdom" series
*John O'Hara: "The Farmers Hotel"
*Chuck Palahniuk: "Snuff (novel)"
*Leo Perutz: "From Nine to Nine"
*Terry Pratchett: "Hogfather"
*Matthew Reilly: "Scarecrow" (excluding the prologue and the epilogue)
*Paullina Simons: "Eleven Hours"
*Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich"
*Graham Swift: "The Light of Day"
*Christos Tsiolkas: "Loaded"
*Anne Tyler : "Breathing Lessons"
*Virginia Woolf: "Mrs. Dalloway" and "Between the Acts"