If you’re feeling overwhelmed by the tomes piling up on your bedside table, try reaching for a novella instead. These slim, punchy books can be finished in a single day – and might just reignite your love of reading. Here are some of our favourites.
Assembly by Natasha Brown
Inspired by her career working in finance, Brown’s thrilling debut is just a hundred pages long and “written in vignettes that leave a lot of white space on the page”, said The Guardian. The story follows a young Black woman who “seems to have it all”: a great job, money, and a “loving, liberal, generationally wealthy boyfriend”. But simmering beneath the surface is a “desperate rage” at the racism and misogyny she navigates every day.
Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Townsend Warner
This “deeply strange” novel begins “conventionally enough”, with a quiet young woman leaving London to start afresh in a rural village, said The Guardian. But Townsend Warner “gleefully” changes tack when her heroine, Lolly Willowes, becomes a witch. “Smashing together” an array of genres from folk horror to nature writing, it’s a short but mighty book that helped cement its author as “one of the true originals of 20th-century English literature”.
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Orbital by Samantha Harvey
Harvey’s “otherworldly” 140-page novel scooped the Booker Prize in 2024, proving longer doesn’t necessarily mean better, said Good Housekeeping. Set aboard the International Space Station, her “gorgeously written” book follows six astronauts orbiting Earth over 24 hours. Filled with beautiful prose and breathtaking imagery, she offers an “intriguing perspective on the human race’s treatment of our planet”. It’s a must-read.
Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan
Set in a small Irish town in the 1980s, this is a “quiet but deeply moving” story, said Daisy Lester in The Independent. It follows a “duteous father” who is confronted with the harrowing treatment of unmarried young women at the hands of the church at one of the country’s infamous Magdalene Laundries. “Haunting yet hopeful”, I devoured the entire book in “one short afternoon, but have been reflecting on it for far longer”.
Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys
Rhys’ “chilling, dreamlike” prequel to “Jane Eyre” explores another side to Charlotte Brontë’s “madwoman in the attic”, said Adrienne Westenfeld in Esquire. We meet the white Creole heiress, Antoinette Cosway, in Jamaica years before the events of Thornfield Hall. Isolated and lonely, she is soon “driven to despair” by the cruelty of her new husband Edward Rochester. Rhys’ book is just 176 pages long; packed with “gorgeous imagery and turbulent emotions”, it will roll over you like a “hazy island fever dream”.
Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? by Lorrie Moore
Moore expertly captures “female adolescence and the intensity of its friendships” in her “luscious and funny” book, said The Economist. The action follows Berie as she looks back at the “small, wild joys of her teenage years”, and tries to figure out how her life has become so “staid and unfulfilling”. She begins to see the “mockery and rebellion” she and her best friend had loved as “callow answers to teenage insecurities” – but her story still “vibrates with regret for what she has lost”.
