Ulysses by James Joyce (1922)

Everything happens on one ordinary Thursday in Dublin: a man eats a kidney for breakfast, attends a funeral, drifts through pubs and a newspaper office and a maternity hospital, and walks home well after midnight. Joyce poured the whole of a human mind into the passing hours, every flicker of memory and appetite and grief caught as it happens, until the inside of a head becomes the largest place there is. The book changes voice with every chapter, ventriloquizing newspaper headlines, a religious catechism, the entire history of English prose itself, daring you to keep up and rewarding you when you do. And it ends inside Molly Bloom, half-asleep beside her husband, her thoughts running on without a single full stop toward the most famous yes in all of literature. Few books have loved one human life this completely. Give it the patience it asks for, and a single Dublin day opens into the whole of being alive.