Mrs. Dalloway

The book moves across that single day, following not only Clarissa but the strangers who pass through the same streets and skies. Chief among them is Septimus Warren Smith, a young veteran whose shell-shocked mind reads mystery and terror into an advertisement written in smoke overhead, while his wife Rezia stands helpless beside him. The two lives never quite meet, yet they answer each other, the hostess arranging her evening and the soldier whom no doctor can reach, as memory, mortality, and lost love ripple under the city's glittering surface.

Woolf writes from inside her people, letting thought spill into thought: Peter still relitigating an old rejection, Richard walking home with flowers though he cannot say the words, the eminent Sir William Bradshaw preaching his gospel of "proportion." The prose is tender to ordinary joys and unsparing about the polished surfaces people arrange to survive behind.

It is a novel about how much a single day can hold — a broken fountain, a marching column of boys, a green dress mended for a party, a life measured against a stranger's. For any reader curious how the whole weather of a soul can move through one afternoon in London, the door stands open.