Short books you can finish in a sitting
15 books
An Irish girl is sent to relatives one summer when her mother is having another baby. Ninety pages, every one of them earned. You'll finish it on the bus.
A coal merchant in 1980s Ireland realises what's happening at the convent. A hundred pages, most of them set in the cab of a truck on a winter road.
A 36-year-old Tokyo convenience store clerk is happy. Everyone around her insists this is unacceptable. Murata writes deadpan sociology in 160 pages.
A Korean wife refuses meat and her family's response is the novel. Three sections, three perspectives, none of them hers, all of them missing her.
A man lives in a house of infinite halls and statues, walks the tides, keeps a journal. The reveal of where he is and why is the book's whole pleasure.
Two sisters in a poisoned house at the edge of the village. Jackson writes domestic gothic in the voice of an eighteen-year-old who knows more than she'll say.
A monk meets the first robot in two centuries. Chambers builds a hopeful future in 150 pages and it doesn't feel cheap.
A day labourer in the American West, born in 1880-something, lives through the century by accident. Johnson covers a lifetime in 116 pages.
An aging Cuban fisherman, eighty-four days without a catch, then the marlin. Hemingway distilled to the bone, and one of the best afternoons of reading you can have.
A diver finds a pearl the size of a gull's egg and his life immediately stops being his. Steinbeck at his most parable-like.
A daughter moves home for a year to help her mother care for her father, who's losing his memory. Diary entries, jokes, kindness, no plot, every page worth it.
Japanese picture brides arriving in California in the early twentieth century, told in the first person plural. A choral novel in 130 pages.
A clockmaker dying in his bed remembers his epileptic father. Harding won the Pulitzer with 190 pages and a small unknown press.
One day in June, a woman buying flowers, a soldier coming undone, the city of London thinking aloud. Woolf in her cleanest book.
Animals overthrow the farmer and the pigs become the farmer. Orwell's parable of the Soviet experiment in under 130 pages, and it has not aged.
