Every now and then I glut myself on books - there does need to be a little magic in the air, though, that lands them in the 'reserved' section of the mobile library on Thursdays and Saturdays. Some books have waiting lists 120 people long, so I've forgotten about them by the time they arrive. I scour 'best' lists and book reviews on the internet, hoping against all the odds I'll find something I'd like to read. This week I was lucky - Becky Chambers' sci-fi arrived, and a true crime page-turner that was more trash than treasure but still enjoyable (Penance, about some teenage girls who set a friend on fire and killed her) and this one - On the Calculation of Volume by Danish writer Solvej Balle.

The plot itself seems quite banal and rather Groundhog Day - a woman wakes up every morning on the 18th of November. There's no explanation for it or any rules of time that seem to keep her there, despite her investigations. She decides to come home early, surprising her partner, and explains to him every day why she's home and what happened. At first, he believes her and tries to help, even though he wakes up every morning with no memory of events:

We read tales of pockets, leaps and labyrinths in time. We read aloud to another. We reflected and fantasised and waited for this to make sense of time. We strayed into more fans of all explanations. Was it the Roman cesterius? Was it love? Was it burn on my hand that it opened the door until another time? Could there be a natural explanation or were there unknown forces of work here?

It's confusing, of course. Why do some things come through time with her, and why do some things disappear? Food, for example, disappears - she feels like a monster, eating the world, and changes her habits to buy food from different stores lest she leaves them with empty shelves. There's a terrible sadness to it as Thomas moves further away from her in time - she has long, long passages of time (recording the days in a journal as she moves up to the year mark) during which she simply hides in a room or wanders the streets, and he wakes every day on the 18th with no knowledge at all of this anomaly. He becomes a ghost to her, separated from her.

I know because I have seen who we are: Thomas is a ghost and I am a monster. That's the way things are. It is time that has done this. Without me Thomas is a ghost, but I am a monster, a beast, a pest.

There's a repetition to the language, an understatedness - no lyricism here. The woodpile grows smaller. There are repeated details - the scrape of a pot in the wind - that create this uneasy passage of time and being stuck within it.

It's not that I didn't know this. It's not that I haven't seen the shelves growing barer and barer, but now it's a problem. It makes a difference. If Thomas is a ghost and I am a monster then the distance between us is greater than I thought. Thomas leaves no trail in the world, I eat it up. He is a pattern in the house, I am a monster in the guest room. If I go out there we will be two monsters. I will drag him into my world and we will eat for two. It is me who makes the difference. He is a ghost and ghosts haunt. They return, again and again. Monsters rampage through the world and leave it devastated. I sit in this room overlooking the garden and a woodpile. I don't do much. But still I am using up the world while Thomas lives in a world that restores itself. I leave a trail. I have become a ravening monster, a monster in a finite world. A swarm of locusts. How long can my little world endure me?

It's this marvellous, repetitive, detailed, stripped-down prose which makes it stand out from perhaps more banal, less literate books about being stuck in time. The subject matter perhaps is nothing new, but the prose is. In some ways it reminds me of Kazuo Ishiguro and how they both manage to write so calmly about very uneasy things. It's easy to be caught up in the author's obsessive thinking as the novel circles the same ideas from various angles, without becoming boring.

I'm so hypnotised by it I finish the whole book, mostly in the bath, saving the last chapter for just before bed.

I'm now waiting eagerly for the library to magic the follow-up novels into my hands - the waiting list is understandably long, as people who borrow the first novel must be wanting time to pass quickly so they can borrow the next.

Don't expect easy answers or an elaborate plot, just mesmerising prose and vivid detail.