Helen Schulman's This Beautiful Life is a moving novel about how the events of a single night change a family forever. When 15-year-old Jake Bergamot becomes the catalyst for a younger schoolmate's sexually explicit video going viral, the choices he makes affect the choices that his parents make--and soon the carefully constructed "beautiful life" that the Bergamots have constructed is in disarray (there's a house of cards on the book jacket in case you need any clues about the outcome).
While Schulman's book is about the events of a single night, it doesn't take place entirely in that night. No wonder! The "single day" scenario isn't an easy one to pull off with panache. Three other books that use the conceit in different ways:
Saturday by Ian McEwan takes place in London on February 15, 2003--a post 9/11 day whose ordinariness has been forever shifted by global terror. A middle-aged neurosurgeon named Henry Perowne is woken before dawn by the sight of a fiery plane heading towards Heathrow Airport. While Henry's thoughts turn to terrorism, the events of his day show that the unease affecting First World countries can be more damaging in some ways than death and destruction.
One Day by David Nicholls might be a cheat--because while the action is confined to one day, it unfolds on that same day over a number of years. However, we're including it here because it is a clever and different way of looking at how 24 hours unfolds for humans. Dex and Emma meet at university in 1988, and over the ensuing 20 years we see them each July 15--sometimes together, sometimes not. No spoilers, here, but there is a major motion picture out in theaters now....
Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf is a dreamy novel about the morning-to-evening 1920s London peregrinations of an upperclass chatelaine preparing for a dinner party. Clarissa Dalloway begins the day gazing at a skywriting plane--a scene that McEwan paid homage to in the aforementioned Saturday. If that novel primarily deals with world events through the lens of one man's actions, Woolf's deals with gender roles and the post-World War I Western world's new landscape.