Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf (1925)

Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself, and with that sentence the whole of London opens like a flung-back window: a June morning after the war, Big Ben booming the hours into the air, a single ordinary day stretched wide enough to hold an entire life. Clarissa is giving a party tonight. But the prose refuses to stay with her, slipping from mind to mind across the city, into the thoughts of an old lover, a passing stranger, and Septimus Warren Smith, a shell-shocked young veteran who hears the dead singing in Regent's Park and can no longer bear the weight of being alive. Woolf finds the deepest things in the smallest gestures, the way a whole life can turn on a kiss remembered for thirty years. When word of a death reaches the lit, crowded party, you understand what the shimmering day has been building toward, and why ordinary happiness can suddenly feel like grace.