Recommendations of short novels / novellas

[YouBelongWithMe]

I'm determined to read more but my busy weekday routines mean I have very little time and am exhausted. Weekends are my only real reading time.

I'm starting January with the intention of reading short texts, trying to re-establish positive reading habits with some feeling of 'success'.

So far this month I've read 'I Who Have Never Known Men' and 'Small Boat'. About to start reading 'Rizzio'.

Please can you suggest your favourite short reads?

Thanks

Claire Keegan is great for shorter novels - all of her work is superb.

The Road by Cormac McCarthy is fairly short too, and excellent.

Yes, I have 'Small Things Like These' in my WOB basket!

It's not quite short stories, but I enjoyed Maggie O'Farrell's I Am, I Am, I Am: Seventeen Brushes with Death is a memoir made up of 17 true stories from her life, each describing a moment when she came frighteningly close to dying.

Passing by Nella Larsen is excellent.

Just realised you weren't even asking for short stories 🤦🏻‍♀️🤡😁

The Great Gatsby

On Chesil Beach

The bell jar

The bell jar

Oops

McCarthy is a superb stylist, but my god is he depressing. I thought Thomas Hardy was grim, but McCarthy makes Hardy seem like P. G. Wodehouse!

Aldous Huxley: Chrome Yellow
Evelyn Waugh: Decline and Fall
George Orwell: Down and Out in Paris and London
Virginia Woolf: Orlando
Oscar Wilde: De Profundis
Nabokov: Sebastian Knight
Anthony Powell: Dance to the Music of Time (first volume)

Vita Sackville-West, No Signposts in the Sea
Henry James, The Turn of the Screw
Paul Gallico, The Snow Goose

Claire Keeganis great, as is ‘Rizzio’. Can also recommend Max Porter’s ‘Shy’, and Sarah Moss’s ‘Ghost Wall’ and ‘The Fell’. All of Muriel Spark’s novels are short enough to whizz through too.

Shortish, or maybe they just feel short because they're so engulfing, but anything by Elizabeth Strout would be my recommendation.

Brighton Rock - Graham Greene
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie - Muriel Spark. In fact, a lot of Muriel Spark - A Far Cry From Kensington, Loitering With Intent and Memento Mori are all little gems.

Curtis Sittenfield has some good shorts, would echo Claire Keegan as well.

A Month in the Country by JL Carr, it's fascinating.

I love short novels. My favourites are some of the classics:
The Great Gatsby
Jekyll & Hyde
Of Mice & Men
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
Decline & Fall
Christmas Carol
Turn of the Screw
The Third Man
Our Man in Havana

I liked Foster by Claire Keegan, though I do think many of her novellas are actually short stories in large print and should be sold as collections. I read her most recent one without buying it at WH Smith in an airport while DH was browsing.

I loved Kitchen by Banana Yoshimoto.
If you like futuristic, experimental writing, I highly recommend The Semplica Girl Diaries by George Saunders which is a very short novella or very long short story included in his short story collection Tenth of December.

Thank you. Not read this one. On the list.

Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys (only if you've read Jane Eyre, though)
Diary of a Nobody, George and Weedon Grossmith
Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad
Scoop, Evelyn Waugh
The Poisoned Chocolates Case, Anthony Berkeley
Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day, Winifred Watson (I haven't read this but I heard a really excellent reading of it on the radio not long ago)

Oh yes, there are several I love and had forgotten on here - Wide Sargasso Sea (and Good Morning, Midnight and Voyage in the Dark - also by Jean Rhys), Scoop and Diary of a Nobody.

Haven't read the others on your list but will add them to mine.

I quite liked that too and I usually can't stand her writing style. It was a fascinating study of how much chance plays a part in our continued existence.

Breakfast at Tiffany's
Animal Farm
The Great Gatsby
Of Mice and Men

Thank you for all these! I'm currently reading A Clockwork Orange but not sure how I feel about it. Will persevere for another 20 pages before deciding.

Stephen King’s short story collection are generally superb as are his novellas. Nightmares and Dreamscapes is a good collection, also Different Seasons (might be under his Richard Bachman pseudonym can’t remember).