Books can take time to get through. More time than listening to albums or watching films ; often, more time than entire TV series. But the best short novels offer a solution to this problem – if it’s even a problem, and you’re not in need of something long and complex to sink your teeth into.
A short novel, or novella, if it’s especially short, is one of literary life’s great pleasures: at under 200 pages, or even under 100, they can be read in one sitting or only a handful, especially if you’re on holiday and have a few unbroken hours stretching ahead of you. Because short books can be despatched so quickly, you can often end up with an unusually well-rounded appreciation of them, in a way you can’t by splitting a thick Victorian tome into a month of commutes. And, a bit less high-mindedly, short novels are great for bulking up your headline number of books read in a year.
So if you want to juice your Goodreads stats – or just take something small but perfectly formed to the beach – here are a few of our top suggestions. Small Things Like These , which was made into a film starring Cillian Murphy this year, is the best-known work by Claire Keegan, the modern Irish master of the short story and novella. But Foster , published in 2010, is even better.
It’s under 100 pages but packs more emotional weight than novels many times longer. The story is simplicity itself – a girl in rural Ireland is temporarily sent to live with foster parents while her mother g.