Set over the course of the same April day, with morning, afternoon and night ascribed to consecutive years, Michael Cunningham’s Day is built around time’s march towards an inevitable ending. This feeling of being caught up in time and trapped by its onward force is shared by the novel’s small cast of characters. A married couple, Isabel and Dan Byrne, along with Isabel’s brother Robbie, are struggling with their floundering careers, ageing bodies and their place in the world. They are also balancing a painful platonic love triangle, with both Dan and Isabel more in love with Robbie than with each other.

The claustrophobic domesticity of the novel is amplified by its timespan: 2019-21. The pandemic is not overtly mentioned, but the conditions it creates of confinement and stasis intensify the family’s problems. By depicting the Byrnes before, during and after the crisis, Cunningham masterfully conveys the traumas and growing realisations experienced by everybody during Covid.

The feeling of being trapped both by lockdown and more generally by circumstances gives the novel an anxious undertone. Isabel sees herself as ‘paralysed by her own selfishness and triviality, a woman who knew she should love her life more than she did but couldn’t seem to love her life beyond a few odd, inconsequential incidents’. There’s a sense that each decision made or not made constricts the potential of the future until there’s only one possible outcome. But the brilliance of Cunningham’s prose prevents Day from being an uncomfortable read; it’s simply an uncomfortably relatable one.

The expectations and naivety of youth are contrasted with the quiet domesticity of family life, with characters having to give up on the wild dreams of their past. For Isabel,

the trick now, it seems, is to keep wanting it, the job as well as the marriage, motherhood, the stratospherically costly handbag. The trick is learning not to despise herself for her claustrophobia and disappointment.

A fake Instagram account provides her and Robbie with a break from reality, offering an escape into the beautiful falseness of social media. ‘Plus, Lyla doesn’t exist,’ Robbie points out. ‘Right. Of course she doesn’t,’ Isabel realises. Cunningham’s gentle derision of the Instagrammification of modern life also draws attention to another inherent falseness – that of writing a story at all.

Perhaps, then, Day is a novel about the human instinct to use storytelling as a way to cope. And when the story is told so beautifully, that’s certainly an attractive idea.