Great Fiction thats Not Too Long
Discover the best short fiction books that pack a punch! Our curated list features great reads that are engaging, impactful, and not too long—perfect for busy book lovers.
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Le Grand Meaulnes
by Alain-Fournier
The classic French novel written by a soldier, who would later die during World War I, tells the story of Auguste Meaulnes and the "domain mysterieux."
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The Sand Child
by Tahar Ben Jelloun
A poetic vision of power, colonialism, and gender in North Africa, The Sand Child has been justifiably celebrated around the world as a daring and significant work of international fiction.
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Thirst
by Shulamith Hareven
Three novellas by an Israeli woman writer. The Miracle Hater is on a man who loses his faith, Prophet is on a prophet who loses his powers, and After Childhood is on a marriage between a woman from the hills and a man from the plain.
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The Beginning of Spring
by Penelope Fitzgerald
Frank Reid is a struggling printer in Moscow. On the eve of the Revolution, his wife returns to her native England, leaving him to raise their three young children alone. How does a reasonable man like Frank cope? Should he listen to the Tolstoyan advice of his bookkeeper? And should he, in his wife's absence, resist his desire for his lovely Russian housemaid? How can anyone know how to live the right life?
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An Artist of the Floating World
by Kazuo Ishiguro
From the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature and author of the Booker Prize–winning novel The Remains of the Day In the face of the misery in his homeland, the artist Masuji Ono was unwilling to devote his art solely to the celebration of physical beauty. Instead, he put his work in the service of the imperialist movement that led Japan into World War II. Now, as the mature Ono struggles through the aftermath of that war, his memories of his youth and of the "floating world"—the nocturnal world of pleasure, entertainment, and drink—offer him both escape and redemption, even as they punish him for betraying his early promise. Indicted by society for its defeat and reviled for his past aesthetics, he relives the passage through his personal history that makes him both a hero and a coward but, above all, a human being.
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Pnin
by Vladimir Nabokov
One of the best-loved of Nabokov’s novels, Pnin features his funniest and most heart-rending character. Serialized in The New Yorker and published in book form in 1957, Pnin brought Nabokov both his first National Book Award nomination and hitherto unprecedented popularity. “Fun and satire are just the beginning of the rewards of this novel. Generous, bewildered Pnin, that most kindly and impractical of men, wins our affection and respect.” —Chicago Tribune Professor Timofey Pnin is a haplessly disoriented Russian émigré precariously employed on an American college campus in the 1950s. Pnin struggles to maintain his dignity through a series of comic and sad misunder-standings, all the while falling victim both to subtle academic conspiracies and to the manipulations of a deliberately unreliable narrator. Initially an almost grotesquely comic figure, Pnin gradually grows in stature by contrast with those who laugh at him. Whether taking the wrong train to deliver a lecture in a language he has not mastered or throwing a faculty party during which he learns he is losing his job, the gently preposterous hero of this enchanting novel evokes the reader’s deepest protective instinct.
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The Barrytown Trilogy
by Roddy Doyle
A one-volume edition of the celebrated trio of novels about the Rabbitte family, from the Booker Prize-winning author of Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha The Barrytown Trilogy gathers Roddy’s Doyle’s first three novels into one volume: The Commitments, one of the funniest rock’n’roll novels ever written, about a group of aspiring musicians on a mission to bring soul to Dublin; The Snapper, about the progression of twenty-year-old Sharon Rabbitte’s pregnancy on her family; and The Van, a finalist for the Booker Prize, a tender and hilarious tale of male friendship, midlife crisis, and family life, set during the heady days of Ireland’s brief, euphoric triumphs in the 1990 World Cup.
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According to Queeney
by Beryl Bainbridge
Samuel Johnson, the literary giant of mid-eighteenth century London, becomes part of the chaotic household of wealthy brewer Henry Thrale.
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We Think the World of You
by Joe Randolph Ackerley
"Frank, the narrator, is a middle-aged civil servant, intelligent, acerbic, self-righteous, angry. He is in love with Johnny, a young, married, working-class man with a sweetly easygoing nature. When Johnny is sent to prison for committing a petty theft, Frank gets caught up in a struggle with Johnny's wife and parents for access to him." -- Cover.