Time is precious, but so is knowledge.
In allowing ourselves to get lost in a story, we’re exploring one of our most vulnerable states. Suspended between reality and fiction – whether on the tube during the morning commute, in the back of a coffee shop or on the sofa at home – we’re exposed to romance, philosophy, religion, heartbreak, devastation and unadulterated joy through as little as a singular A5 page.
While losing oneself in a hefty novel such as Hanya Yanagihara’s simultaneously beloved and reviled A Little Life is all well and good, there’s something incredibly special about racing through a novella and feeling as though our personal world has shifted on its axis in the space of a few hours.
On a personal note, I once sat in my darkened university library and read Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein in a singular, unbroken sitting until dawn broke. Mind you, I had a tutorial the next morning that I hadn’t prepared for. Though born out of my own lack of preparation, I felt unequivocally changed by my experience, and will never forget the closing, frost-bitten scene of Shelley’s 288-page magnum opus, nor the embarrassing tears that flooded my eyes in a very public space.
That’s not to say you simply must read a shorter novel in one sitting in order to feel its full effects – far from it. Dipping in and out of a sub-300-page masterpiece will fill pockets of your life with a spectrum of imaginative possibilities and sheer inspiration.
No matter your day-to-day profession or how you tend to pass the time, short novels allow you to take a break from the quotidian without fighting your own memory to understand just where you left off, which character you’re now following, and where the plot has taken you.
In keeping with this article’s theme, we’ll keep its introduction short. Keep scrolling for a curated selection of some of the best short novels of all time.
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Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
As you may well know, the story behind Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein or The Modern Prometheus was crafted when she was just 18 years old during one fateful stay at Villa Diodati near Geneva, with a motley bunch including the likes of Percy Shelley, Lord Byron and John Polidori in tow.
What began as a scary story competition between a group of renowned authors and a teenage girl resulted in one of the most emotionally moving, Icarus-like moral tales about flying too close to the sun. Shorter than you’d expect, the 288-page marvel is a piece of literature everyone should read at least once in their lives.
Buy now £7.29, Amazon
To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
The entirety of Woolf’s seminal novel reads more like a series of oil paintings. The reader feels as though they are perpetually perched on a windowsill, looking in on the lives of the Ramsay family at their holiday home in the Isle of Skye through each sunrise and sunset. While visitors come and go, we remain captivated – watching over the ancestral house surrounded by sea and sky, learning of the intricate inner workings of family life.
Buy now £3.49, Amazon
My Face for the World to See by Alfred Hayes
A 128-page treatise on the dark side of 1950s Hollywood, the story begins when a disillusioned writer saves an aspiring young actress from a drunken suicide attempt. As their seemingly casual relationship unfolds, Hayes reveals the falsity of the American Dream with every turn of the page.
Buy now £7.65, Amazon
The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon
While Pynchon’s distinctly post-modern and wildly satirical style may not be for everyone, The Crying of Lot 49 is a highly accessible piece of literature filled with his signature humour, sharp wit and bizarre happenings.
The story begins when Oedipa Maas learns that she has been made the executrix of a former lover’s estate, the duties of which send her on a maddening expedition which requires her to put on a detective’s hat.
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The Lonely Londoners by Sam Selvon
Written by Trinidadian author Samuel Selvon, The Lonely Londoners offers an incredibly moving, yet wonderfully humorous depiction of immigrant life in London in the 1950s. The story begins when an increasingly homesick Moses Aloetta meets Henry ‘Sir Galahad’ Oliver and teaches him how to survive in the city.
Buy now £8.27, Amazon
Wandering Souls by Cecile Pin
Published in paperback in January 2024, Cecile Pin’s debut novel has already been met with rave reviews. Longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2023, this heart-breaking piece of contemporary literature begins just after the last American troops leave Vietnam.
A trio of siblings, separated from the rest of their family and utterly alone in the world, navigate a series of perilous journeys which see them take refuge in camps and resettlement centres until they find themselves in Thatcher-era Britain.
In a poignant, sweeping narrative that oscillates between the world of the living and the dead, this haunting story nevertheless tells the tale of unmoored Vietnamese children in the UK with an emphasis on heritage and hope.
Buy now £8.49, Waterstones
South and West by Joan Didion
Even though South and West is only really a collection of notes and musings about Didion’s travels throughout the American deep South, her incomparable insight and ability to delve into the deepest corners of societal prejudices and idiosyncratic behaviours shines through as though this text is the polished final edition of a novel that has been worked on for decades.
Writing of the sticky and often sickly heat which encompasses the vast majority of towns and cities in the South, Didion at once reveals the sense of claustrophobia she feels not only because of the weather, but also the strange flat contentedness that its citizens feel in their unenviable positions. This, followed by her musings of California, makes for a strangely complete reflection on the polarities of the United States that is as relevant today as it was in the 1970s where the book is set.
Buy now £6.72, Amazon
The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
The year is 1953, and Esther Greenwood has just begun an internship at a prestigious New York magazine. Ecstatic that she might finally be on track to reach her goal of becoming a famous writer, Esther’s hopes become convoluted and out of control as she grapples with the societal expectations of womanhood.
Plath’s fig tree analogy continues to serve as a consciousness-shifting moment for women across the globe who delve into her magnum opus. Unwaveringly brilliant, the narrative moves from moments of sharp humour and wit to a desperate excising of mental illness in the wake of 1950s misogynistic society. Plath delivers a fictionalised account of her struggles as a writer through the ‘distorting lens of a bell jar’ – as she told her mother when explaining the influences behind the novel. Yet we as readers feel her pain through Esther Greenwood with razor-sharp clarity.
Buy now £9.99, Waterstones
Franny and Zooey by J.D Salinger
No one writes coming-of-age stories quite like J.D Salinger, and while Catcher in the Rye remains his most famous novel, Franny and Zooey is a wildly underrated classic. It follows the relationship between the titular characters, a pair of well-off siblings who hail from a highly sophisticated family full of oddballs. We encounter two journeys into adulthood, from two different perspectives which converge with comedic and emotional splendour.
Buy now £9.99, Waterstones
Piranesi by Susanna Clark
From the best-selling author of Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, Susanna Clark’s Piranesi is a mystical, contemporary marvel which explores a narrative and structure so unique that it is almost unfathomable just how Clark has conjured it into being.
Our titular protagonist Piranesi has always lived in the House. He is a scientist, who each day records the marvels of his celestial home – its endless labyrinthine halls and staircases leading to nowhere, its changing ocean tides and half-submerged colossal statues, its generous fruits and marvellous creatures. But when scratched-out messages begin to appear in faraway halls, Piranesi takes it upon himself to discover what might be hiding beyond his heavenly marble walls.
Buy now £6.29, Amazon
Before the Coffee Gets Cold by Toshikazu Kawaguchi
Translated from Japanese, Kawaguchi’s beautiful novel follows the stories of four separate individuals who enter a mystical coffee shop in Tokyo which has been serving meticulously brewed coffee for over one hundred years. Warm, caffeinated beverages aside, this shop also offers customers the ability to travel back in time to confront their past.
Buy now £9.99, Waterstones
Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin
Baldwin’s groundbreaking 1950s novel continues to serve as a vital literary voice for queer representation. In a first-person, obscurely present-tense narrative, an American ex-pat named David tells us the story of his life from his home in the south of France. In under 200 pages, we learn of the breakdown of David’s marriage to Hella and his subsequent romantic entanglement with an Italian waiter named Giovanni. Forced to confront his concept of morality and a suffocating case of internalised homophobia, the level of raw candour in Baldwin’s novel was – and continues to be – monumental.
Buy now £7.09, Amazon
