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Tell me your favourite short novels/novellas

44 replies

Aftertheharvest · 29/12/2022 20:07

I love a short novel and looking for some inspiration for new ones! Favourites are anything by Sarah Moss, Claire Keegan and Penelope Fitzgerald. Also loved Order of the Day and Eve out of her ruins this year.

OP posts:
hagsrus0 · 06/01/2023 16:21

Martha in Paris by Margery Sharp - and the other two books of the trilogy as well, but Paris is the gem for me!

TildaRae · 06/01/2023 18:21

The fall of the house of Usher Edgar Allan Poe . It is short, but such a masterpiece (in my opinion!).

JoonT · 06/01/2023 20:19

highlandcoo · 02/01/2023 19:03

Just a short story, however The Gardener by Kipling is an old one but a good one. I remember my very sweet elderly English professor saying that he could never read it without weeping. Subtle and moving.You can find it online.

Ah yes, great choice. I read Kipling's Jungle Book last year. God, it's wonderful – gorgeous poetic prose.

Anita Brookner's Hotel du Lac is a lovely short novel. She's criminally underrated.

The first of Edward St Aubyn's Melrose novels is pretty short, if I remember.

Anthony Burgess (another underrated writer) wrote a great short novel/novella on the final days of John Keats (who died in Rome). I think it's called Abba, Abba.

Oscar Wilde: The Portrait of Mr WH is great, though I guess that's a long short story rather than a novella. There is something so attractive about Wilde's world. As a kid, I wanted to live in late 19th-century England, talk like Wilde's aesthetes and decadents, smoke opium cigarettes, stroll about on the manicured lawns of country houses, etc.

Howeverdoyouneedme · 06/01/2023 22:10

My Phantoms. Gwendoline Riley.

PristineSnow · 07/01/2023 16:52

Howeverdoyouneedme · 06/01/2023 22:10

My Phantoms. Gwendoline Riley.

She’s so good, isn’t she? I like pretty much everything she’s ever published.

emmylousings · 07/01/2023 17:00

Second On Chesil Beach, Ian McEwan, it's so moving. Also thoroughly enjoyed The Cockroach, by him. Totally different books, The Cockroach is weird and funny.

AdaColeman · 07/01/2023 17:17

I very much enjoyed Piranesi by Susanna Clarke.

I agree that A Month in the Country is wonderful, every character so perfectly drawn with just a few deft words.

WinterFoxes · 07/01/2023 17:19

JonSnowsCupbearer · 31/12/2022 11:40

Different Seasons by Stephen King - three of the four have been made into films (The Shawshank Redemption, Stand by Me and Apt Pupil), but I much prefer the book to the films - I have read it many times over the years.

It's a great book, isn't it?

Howeverdoyouneedme · 07/01/2023 22:49

Gwendoline Riley is a genius writer.

I think someone said Sarah Moss.

Aftertheharvest · 16/01/2023 14:03

I read My Name is Lucy Barton by Elizabeth Strout at the weekend and loved it so will look forward to reading the others in the series.

OP posts:
Brontosaurus · 16/01/2023 15:11

Agree that A Month in the Country is completely wonderful.

I also love:

A Whole Life, Robert Seethaler.

The Uncommon Reader, Alan Bennett

The Time Machine, The Island of Doctor Moreau and The Invisible Man by H.G.Wells

We Have Always Lived in the Castle, Shirley Jackson

Piranesi, Susanna Clarke

The Lost World, Conan Doyle

The Yellow Wallpaper, Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Three Men in A Boat, Jerome K Jerome

Magentax · 19/01/2023 11:14

Some fab suggestions here, I have read most of them and agree with all. Have managed to miss A Month in the Country so have just ordered it.

A slightly different suggestion is A Short Stay in Hell by Steven Peck. It's a sort of meditation on eternity and a completely terrifying idea of hell as run by bureaucrats rather than torturers. I read it a few years ago and I don't think I have ever had a book that stayed with me as much.

Rauha · 19/01/2023 11:17

Sweet Bean Paste by Durian Sukegawa

SnowAndIceLobelia · 19/01/2023 11:35

I am currently reading The Pursuit of Love by Nancy Mitford which is short and very funny.

I also love Chronicle of a Death Foretold by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

Gasp0deTheW0nderD0g · 19/01/2023 11:38

Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad

Sherlock Holmes stories, Conan Doyle - much better, to my mind, than the full-length SH novels

Chekhov - it's a long time since I read some of his collected short stories but I really enjoyed them at the time

Metamorphosis, Frank Kafka

Diary of a Nobody is quite short. I've read it many times and nowadays often just pick it up and dip in a random. It never, ever palls for me. One of the funniest books ever written but so well observed too.

Most Evelyn Waugh novels, the early ones anyway, are quite short and all the better for that. Brideshead is my least favourite of his books, not least because I think it's too long. Decline and Fall is either his first or second novel and very short, as I recall. He also wrote some excellent short stories. I have a collection I probably bought in the 80s. Don't know what's available now, but the one that sticks in my head are Mr Loveday's Little Outing. I suspect Waugh is a Marmite author but I love his books.

A Dance to the Music of Time is a sequence of 12 novels published 1951 - 1975 by Waugh's friend and contemporary Anthony Powell, whose early books are all nice and short, by the way, and also worth reading if you like early/mid 20th century fiction, as I do. However, I mainly want to recommend Dance as it's one of my favourite works of fiction of all time. You can read each book as a stand alone work, but you should read them in order, as the character development across the whole sequence is absolutely masterly. It might just scrape in here as none of the books are particularly long.

SnowAndIceLobelia · 19/01/2023 11:45

Oh just rememebred The Quiet American by Graham Greene is wonderful. And the film version with Michael Caine and Brendan Fraser is perfect.

BigMadAdrian · 19/01/2023 12:52

The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman - probably sits somewhere between novella and novel in length - I found it very creepy. I really liked his two American Gods novellas too (The Monarch of the Glen and Black Dog), but you need to read AG first really, and that is not a short novel!

Agree with a pp about Piranesi too - I thought it was as close to perfect as it is possible to get.

I love short stories and novellas, but I there are so many rubbish ones about (especially short stories) - they have to be exactly the right length, no bagginess or rushed bits. It must be very hard to write them well.

ButtonSister · 30/01/2023 00:25

Alice Munro - she writes short stories but some are quite long, possibly almost novella length.

FlameGrilledSquirrel · 31/01/2023 16:26

Stephen King - Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption, The Long Walk, and The Running Man. Please let the remake of The Running Man happen.

I have no mouth and I must scream - Harlan Ellison. It's pretty grim mind you.

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