Do you ever feel like you don’t have enough time to read? Or you’re really not in the mood to tackle those mammoth-sized books on your shelves that are constantly staring you down. We get it. Here are some great short books to read in a day or less.
Whether you’re looking for a new page-turning book to get lost in or a feel-good story to brighten your day, there’s a short books to read here for everyone else. So what are you waiting for? So pick up one of these short books to read from across genres and get lost in the world of the story. Get reading!
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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A GOOD MAN by Ani Katz
A dark and gripping novel of psychological suspense about a family man driven to unspeakable acts, in the vein of The Perfect Nanny and We Need to Talk About Kevin.
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MARY VENTURA AND THE NINTH KINGDOM by Sylvia Plath
Never before published, this newly discovered story by literary legend Sylvia Plath stands on its own and is remarkable for its symbolic, allegorical approach to a young woman’s rebellion against convention and forceful taking control of her own life.
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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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