Last Updated on April 19, 2024 by BiblioLifestyle
Do you ever feel like you don’t have enough time to read?  Maybe you’re in the middle of a reading rut or even a reading slump. Or you’re really not in the mood to tackle those mammoth-sized books on your shelves that are constantly staring you down.  Believe me, I get it.  So I decided to compile a list filled with some great short books to read in a day or less. So whether you’re looking for a new page-turning book to get lost in or a feel-good story to brighten your day, you will find some options of short books to read here on this list.  So what are you waiting for?  Pick up one of these short books to read from across genres and get lost in the world of the story.  Get reading!
Short Books To Read in a Day
- The Three of Us by Ore Agbaje-Williams
- Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 by Cho Nam-joo, translated by Jamie Chang
- Fever Dream by Samanta Schweblin
- Acts of Service by Lillian Fishman
- A Year Without a Name by Cyrus Grace Dunham
- The Hawk’s Way by Sy Montgomery
- Weather by Jenny Offill
- Famous People by Justin Kuritzkes
- An Island by Karen Jennings
- Tin Man by Sarah Winman
- Brown Girls by Daphne Palasi Andreades
- Ghost Wall by Sarah Moss
- Turbulence by David Szalay
- Sula by Toni Morrison
- Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata, translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori
- The Goddess Twins by Yodassa Williams
- Second Place by Rachel Cusk
- The Friend by Sigrid Nunez
- Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys
- Follow Me to Ground by Sue Rainsford
- The Swimmers by Julie Otsuka
- Lanny by Max Porter
- Topics of Conversation by Miranda Popkey
- Red at the Bone by Jacqueline Woodson
- Persuasion by Jane Austen
- Rizzio by Denise Mina
- The Incendiaries by R.O. Kwon
- What We Lose by Zinzi Clemmons
- At Night All Blood Is Black by David Diop, translated by Anna Moschovakis
- The Third Hotel by Laura Van Den Berg
- Assembly by Natasha Brown
- Goodbye, Vitamin by Rachel Khong
- The Girl Who Reads on the Métro by Christine Féret-Fleury
- Hurricane Girl by Marcy Dermansky
- The Last Book Party by Karen Dukess
- The Circus by Jonas Karlsson
- My Sister, the Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite
Fever Dream by Samanta Schweblin
A young woman named Amanda lies dying in a rural hospital clinic. A boy named David sits beside her. She’s not his mother. He’s not her child. Together, they tell a haunting story of broken souls, toxins, and the power and desperation of family.
A Year Without a Name by Cyrus Grace Dunham
For as long as they can remember, Cyrus Grace Dunham felt like a visitor in their own body. Their life was a series of imitations–lovable little girl, daughter, sister, young gay woman–until their profound sense of alienation became intolerable. Written with disarming emotional intensity in a voice uniquely theirs, A Year Without a Name is a potent, thrillingly unresolved queer coming of age story.
Famous People by Justin Kuritzkes
This fresh, smart novel in the guise of a celebrity memoir probes the inner life of a mega-famous pop star.
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Turbulence by David Szalay
From the acclaimed, Man Booker Prize-shortlisted author of All That Man Is, a stunning, virtuosic novel about twelve people, mostly strangers, and the surprising ripple effect each one has on the life of the next as they cross paths while in transit around the world.
Sula by Toni Morrison
Two girls who grow up to become women. Two friends who become something worse than enemies. Their friendship ends in an unforgivable betrayal–or does it end? Terrifying, comic, ribald, and tragic, Sulais a work that overflows with life.
The Goddess Twins by Yodassa Williams
After years of traveling the world, black identical twins Aurora and Arden think they’ve settled into normalcy in Ohio. But days before their eighteenth birthday, the snarky twins develop powers in telekinesis and telepathy―at the same time that their famous mother, who’s on tour in London, disappears.
Second Place by Rachel Cusk
A study of female fate and male privilege, the geometries of human relationships, and the moral questions that animate our lives. It reminds us of art’s capacity to uplift―and to destroy.
Second Place is one of The 10 Best Fiction Books of 2021.
The Friend by Sigrid Nunez
When a woman unexpectedly loses her lifelong best friend and mentor, she finds herself burdened with the unwanted dog he has left behind. Her own battle against grief is intensified by the mute suffering of the dog, a huge Great Dane traumatized by the inexplicable disappearance of its master, and by the threat of eviction: dogs are prohibited in her apartment building.
Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys
This masterpiece of modern fiction was Jean Rhys’s return to the literary center stage. With Wide Sargasso Sea, her last and best-selling novel, she ingeniously brings into light one of fiction’s most fascinating characters: the madwoman in the attic from Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre.
Lanny by Max Porter
There’s a village an hour from London. It’s no different from many others today: one pub, one church, redbrick cottages, some public housing, and a few larger houses dotted about. Voices rise up, as they might anywhere, speaking of loving and needing and working and dying and walking the dogs. This village belongs to the people who live in it, to the land and to the land’s past.
Topics of Conversation by Miranda Popkey
Composed almost exclusively of conversations between women—the stories they tell each other, and the stories they tell themselves—Topics of Conversation careens through twenty years in the life of an unnamed narrator hungry for experience and bent on upending her life.
Red at the Bone by Jacqueline Woodson
An unexpected teenage pregnancy pulls together two families from different social classes, and exposes the private hopes, disappointments, and longings that can bind or divide us from each other, from the New York Times-bestselling and National Book Award-winning author of Another Brooklyn and Brown Girl Dreaming.
Persuasion by Jane Austen
Published in 1818, Persuasion was Jane Austen’s last completed novel. In this compelling love story, Anne Elliott is unhappy and unmarried at twenty-seven. At the urging of her family, she broke her engagement to the man she loved eight years before because he was poor and didn’t have good family connections. When they meet again, he is wealthy, a captain in the navy, and looking for a wife, but he has not forgiven Anne for her rejection and resolves not to fall in love with her again.
Rizzio by Denise Mina
From the multi-award-winning master of crime, Denise Mina delivers a radical new take on one of the darkest episodes in Scottish history—the bloody assassination of David Rizzo, private secretary to Mary, Queen of Scots, in the queen’s chambers in Holyrood Palace.
Rizzio is one of the books on The 2021 Fall Minimalist Reading Guide.
At Night All Blood Is Black by David Diop, translated by Anna Moschovakis
Peppered with bullets and black magic, this remarkable novel fills in a forgotten chapter in the history of World War I. Blending oral storytelling traditions with the gritty, day-to-day, journalistic horror of life in the trenches, David Diop’s At Night All Blood is Black is a dazzling tale of a man’s descent into madness.
At Night All Blood Is Black is one of The 10 Best Fiction Books of 2020.
Assembly by Natasha Brown
Assembly is a story about the stories we live within – those of race and class, safety and freedom, winners and losers. And it is about one woman daring to take control of her own story, even at the cost of her life.
Assembly is one of The 10 Best Fiction Books of 2021.
The Circus by Jonas Karlsson
A real-life vanishing act leaves one man looking for his missing friend in thisKafkaesque new novel from the author of The Room and The Invoice.
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What do you think about this list of short books to read?
Have you read any books from this list? Have any caught your attention? What short books would you add to this list? Let’s talk about it in the comments.
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