B ooks are getting shorter. Or at least, bestselling books are. So say the statistics: a recent analysis demonstrated that, over the past decade, the books on the New York Times bestsellers list have declined in length by 11.5%. Commentators have list this shrinking to economic factors (the rise in the price of paper and manufacturing) and a readership with a shorter attention span in the age of doomscrolling. Whether Twitter and Instagram are to blame or not, there are dozens of brilliant short novels out there waiting to be read.
Find a broad selection of those that have appeared on our site below, from classic books to award-winning contemporary novels. (See also: our interview with the acclaimed novelist Claire Fuller, who selected five of the best novellas and our list of long books . )
“It’s a very poetic book. Samantha Harvey creates beautiful imagery. It gets into the lives of six astronauts from different countries: Russia, Britain, America, Japan, Italy. They are all reflecting upon their own lives through the prism of looking at the Earth from above. It’s very powerful in how it gives this beautiful overview. It’s meditative in lots of ways, but gives us insight into the lives of these very different characters that is very believable and interesting.” Read more...
The Best Novels of 2024: The Booker Prize Shortlist
Nitin Sawhney ,
Musicians, Music Critics & Scholar
“At the centre of this book is the horror of the mistreatment of unmarried mothers and their babies by the Catholic Church in Ireland. It’s set in the 1980s—so recently, but before this scandal became known. The book, of course, is motivated and driven by the horror of what is being done to these women and their babies. But Keegan’s tone is as dispassionate as one could possibly imagine. There’s something absolutely merciless in that measured tone—it’s so much more powerful than an emotional denunciation of the cruelty of what is happening.” Read more...
The Best Fiction of 2022: The Booker Prize Shortlist
Neil MacGregor ,
Art Historians, Critics & Curator
by Susanna Clarke and Chiwetel Ejiofor (narrator)
🏆 Winner of the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2021
Read expert recommendations
“Everyone loves Piranesi … It’s the story of a man who has no memories and no sense of time. He’s been named Piranesi by the only other occupant of the enormous palatial space that he finds himself in, which doesn’t really have the constraints of a physical place…This novel does that masterful, difficult thing of hooking you straight away, at first with nothing but pure intrigue, and then with this momentum of yearning and wonder and anguish all the way through. It’s a small, elegant mystery. There’s something extremely punk rock about releasing a tiny book. Piranesi is not technically a novella, but you could read it in a day or two. I just love that.” Read more...
The Best Ergodic Fiction
Arianna Reiche ,
Novelist
“A number of writers, including Borges and other luminaries of Latin American literature, have described this as a perfect novel. And there is something perfect in its plotting. As I mentioned before, it plays an amazing trick on you. It puts you in an odd situation in which you think you’re reading something like Kafka, where you shouldn’t expect any kind of systematic explanation. And then it miraculously delivers one, which makes a bizarre sense of everything that’s come before.” Read more...
The Best Metaphysical Thrillers
Greg Jackson ,
Novelist
“English was not Conrad’s first language but he wrote better in English than almost any of us can. I sense that the way he’s written this is very much in sympathy of an artificial colonial administrative structure that is foisted on another culture and then what horrors unfold as a consequence.” Read more...
The best books on Displacement
Michelle Jana Chan ,
Novelist
“Like a lot of Jackson’s work, it’s about small communities in 20th century America. It’s about a distrust of women. It follows a long literary tradition of women being accused of poisoning—this being the only disposal in a woman’s power in an otherwise oppressive society. And it’s about strange sisters. So you can see shades of Alice Hoffman’s Practical Magic, though the supernatural in it isn’t as explicit, in fact you could argue there’s nothing supernatural in We Have Always Lived in the Castle at all. Instead it’s about a kind of strangeness.” Read more...
The Best Shirley Jackson Books
Joan Passey ,
Literary Scholar
“A very subtle and understated work. Overlaying the whole book is a feeling of deep nostalgia and regret. It’s a wonderful book. And it was made into a very good film starring Colin Firth.” Read more...
The Best Novellas
Claire Fuller ,
Novelist
“It’s a narrative of life in French colonial Vietnam. It’s the story of a French Catholic schoolgirl whose family has fallen on hard times and of her consensual but scandalous love affair with a rich Chinese Vietnamese. He was 25 and she was only 15 at the time. At the beginning she is attracted by his wealth, but she realizes, in the end, that he was her first love. It was a real reversal of the white expat male with a Vietnamese girl that you see in Graham Greene’s novel, The Quiet American . It broke those stereotypes. It’s radical and it’s an adventure. It just appealed to me when I first read it. It became a bestseller and a million copies were sold.” Read more...
The Best Vietnamese Novels
Sherry Buchanan ,
Journalist
“The book showcases both the allure and the ricketiness of the American dream. The story shows the American dream is fragile despite its potency and persistence. It shows its perpetual obsolescence. We often hear that it’s harder to rise from the bottom to the top in the US than it is in many other countries. Even in Fitzgerald’s day, the fluidity of society was fading. Perhaps The Great Gatsby still seems germane because of the way it showed the mismatch between American actualities and American ideals, the two-faced character of the American dream, its materialism and idealism.” Read more...
The Great American Novel
Lawrence Buell ,
“It’s a strange, sparse little novel about a Jain family living in Luton, England, and grieving the death of their mother. The father and youngest daughter become fixated on the sport squash, spending hours training at a local sports centre every day, driving thoughts of death from their mind with a regimen of drills, ‘ghosting’, sprints, and increasingly desperate matches.” Read more...
The Best Novels of 2023: The Booker Prize Shortlist
Cal Flyn ,
Five Books Editor
“A common thread in much of the South Korean literature I’ve read in translation, and something I love, is the focus on the average person…The Vegetarian is a novel about a woman called Yeong-hye. The first part of the novel is narrated by her husband, who describes her as being completely unremarkable. She’s a homemaker. She makes his dinner. She’s quiet. She wears black slip-on shoes. She’s a gentle presence that is always perfecting her surroundings. She can be seen as an accoutrement to the lives of those around her. I’ve chosen this book because it’s about how a seemingly average person is capable of extraordinary acts.” Read more...
The best books on Being Average
Eleanor Ross ,
“I really love the Penelopiad . It’s wonderful at bringing out some of what I already hinted was important in my work of a translator: teasing out the multiple perspectives, multiple voices, in this poem. I also love how it juxtaposes different styles and different voices. It has both ballad-like verse and prose intermixed, which is not what the Odyssey does, but I think it speaks to something which is in the Odyssey , about the mixture of different modes, different ways of seeing things.” Read more...
The best books on The Odyssey
Emily Wilson ,
Classicist
“The Drowned World is set in a post-apocalyptic future, in which the ice caps have melted and the planet is growing ever hotter. London is flooded; its buildings rise from steamy lagoons where once were Piccadilly Circus and Pall Mall and Trafalgar Square. You can think of it as a sort of cli-fi Heart of Darkness, with that slightly unhinged quality, and the intense heat, and this ominous ramping up of tension. As a vision of the future, it’s rather terrifying. But it’s rather beautiful too: this steamy, swampy London where alligators lurk in cloudy waters, and giant lizards roar at the sun.” Read more...
The best books on Abandoned Places
Cal Flyn ,
Five Books Editor
“Fitzgerald’s study of the human psyche is quite outstanding. Her people are so real. This book gives us a picture of the mean-spiritedness and the small-mindedness of certain communities which perceive in people who are other or strange a target on which to place their own dissatisfaction. And that is what happens to Florence Green, a middle-aged widow, who decides to open a bookshop in this little East Anglian community, and is defeated by the sadism and malice of one of the principal characters there who contrives to spread ill will among the rest of the community.” Read more...
The Best Psychological Novels
Salley Vickers ,
Novelist
“Fever Dream was her first novel and it led her to be very well-known, especially in the international sphere. Lots of people prefer to read novels to short stories—I mean, I love short stories, but I know that most readers prefer novels. So Fever Dream marked an important change for her. It’s in the margins of science fiction or fantastic literature. Something is happening, and you don’t know if it is real or not.” Read more...
Five of the Best 21st-Century Argentinian Novels
Claudia Piñeiro ,
Novelist
“It’s beautifully written and, as a slim novel, you can go back to it every year and always find something new in it. One fascinating side of Miss Brodie is her support for Mussolini and his Fascisti. Again, I’m intrigued that a schoolteacher in 1930 could get away with that – but you could. You’ve got to remember that this is very much a period novel. 1930s Edinburgh: what was it like? Well, it was like a lot of other places: it thought Mussolini was on the right track. It was only later that we found out otherwise. So that was fascinating as well – the way Miss Brodie is condemned for her support of Mussolini. Because at that point she wouldn’t really have been looked askance at.” Read more...
The Best Books by Muriel Spark
Alan Taylor ,
“What struck me about this book is the way in which grief is embodied. In Max Porter’s novel (or novel-poem), grief becomes ‘Crow’, who descends upon this family. He’s variously a babysitter, a friend, a ghost, a terrorizer. He impersonates a mother; he’s a joker; he’s twisted. He causes chaos. That’s what it captures: the absolute unpredictability, and nastiness, and then sudden benevolence of grief.” Read more...
The best books on Grief
Sophie Ratcliffe ,
Literary Scholar
“What I find intriguing about all this is that Vonnegut tried so many times to write the story of his memories of the bombing of Dresden and he kept failing. And, finally with Slaughterhouse Five , he wrote this outrageous story about time travel. That was his way of getting to grips with the horror that he lived with. His character Billy Pilgrim lives through the bombing of Dresden and he goes back and forth to Tralfamadore. There is one beautiful bit where he describes how Billy Pilgrim experienced the bombing of Dresden backwards. The bombs fly up to the airplane, then they go back to the factory and the parts go to the places where the parts came from and eventually back to the mines where the metal is mined. And all this is seen in slow motion. Even though he is no philosopher Vonnegut is still able to ask the questions that all of us think about – how time affects our lives.” Read more...
The best books on Time and Eternity
Carlos Eire ,
Historian
“Tolstoy’s book is about a Shamil lieutenant, Hadji Murad, who goes over to the Russians, then tries to go back. What I like about it is that it shows war as profoundly ignoble – as an awful combination of personal circumstances that end in disaster for everyone. Hadji Murad, it turns out, was forced by tribal politics to join Shamil and become his star fighter; he turns to the Russians because he’s forced by more murderous tribal politics. He fears for his family and he tries to go back, with disastrous consequences, because rivalries among the Russian generals mean he doesn’t get the honourable deal from them that he’s been promised. Tolstoy is fearless in showing everyone in the theatre of war trapped between two tyrannies, the Russian tyranny a terrifying imposition, but the demands of the mountain armies no less tyrannical” Read more...
The best books on Chechnya
Vanora Bennett ,
Historical Novelist
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