Short books you can read in less than a week

Why read this: Gwendoline Riley, master of the short book where every word has earned its place, returns with a novel of piercing clarity. Laura and Putnam’s long friendship – sustained in pubs and passing observations – begins to falter under the weight of grief, work, and the quiet attritions of adult life. Riley’s prose is exacting and unsentimental, alive to the rhythms of speech and the fragility beneath it. What emerges is a study of loyalty, emotional endurance and the small, sustaining acts that keep us tethered to one another.

If you’re looking for: close observation, friendship, grief, dialogue-driven fiction, emotional precision, London settings.

Great for fans of: Rachel Cusk, Deborah Levy, First Love by Gwendoline Riley.

What the experts say: 'This pristine book confirms Riley's position among the finest novelists working today. Her sentences are crystalline and perfect, and her attention to the world is always acute and occasionally tender - I love this book.' Sarah Perry, author of Death of an Ordinary Man and The Essex Serpent.

Why read this: A novel that operates with the logic of a nightmare, Fever Dream distils maternal fear into something taut, uncanny and deeply disquieting. Told through a fragmented dialogue between a dying woman and a mysterious child, Schweblin’s prose is urgent and elliptical, circling questions of contamination, responsibility and the limits of protection. What begins as rural unease sharpens into something far more existential. Brief yet suffocating in its intensity, this is a novel that lingers in the body as much as the mind.

If you’re looking for: unsettling fiction, fractured narration, ecological anxiety, maternal dread, psychological intensity.

Great for fans of: Mariana Enríquez, Samanta Schweblin’s Little Eyes.

What the experts say: ‘A total mind-wrecker’ – Max Porter, author of Grief is the Thing with Feathers.

Why read this: In this spare, quietly devastating novella, absence becomes its own kind of presence. When a mother vanishes in the Pyrenees, the emotional aftershocks ripple through the family she leaves behind. Tóibín’s prose is characteristically restrained, attentive to silence and the unsaid, as a father and son attempt to reconfigure their lives. The arrival of another displaced child complicates grief with the possibility of renewal. A study in emotional endurance and the fragile architectures of love.

If you’re looking for: Parent-child relationships, grief, Irish fiction.

Great for fans of: The Party by Tessa Hadley, So Late in the Day by Claire Keegan.

Why read this: In Watershed, Percival Everett turns his focus once again to the injustices of recent American history, exploring the relationship between Native American activists and Black Panther groups who bonded over their shared enemies in the 1960s Civil Rights movement. When hydrologist Robert Hawks stumbles into a violent conflict over Native American treaty rights, what begins as detachment shifts into uneasy complicity. Set against a stark Colorado landscape, the novel interrogates race, power and state secrecy with Everett’s signature precision and dry wit.

If you’re looking for: Political fiction, moral ambiguity, American history, sparse prose, social critique.

Great for fans of: James by Percival Everett

Why read this: Over just 208 pages, A Sport and A Pastime established James Salter's reputation as one of the finest writers of our time, and few novels render desire with such clarity and control. Salter’s elegant, elliptical prose traces an affair between a young American and a French shop assistant, filtered through an ambiguous narrator. Less about plot than perception, it becomes a meditation on memory, voyeurism and the act of storytelling itself.

If you’re looking for: Sensual prose, unreliable narration, 1960s setting, books set in France, intimacy, literary minimalism.

Great for fans of: What Belongs to You by Garth Greenwell, The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera, The Possesion by Annie Ernaux.

What the experts say: 'Slender, cynical and bruisingly sexy, the novel represents the first full flowering of [Salter’s] mature style; his exquisite sentences and extraordinary evocation of place.' – The Daily Telegraph.

Why read this: Over the course of a rain-soaked solstice day, Moss constructs a quietly ominous chorus of voices in a Scottish holiday park. With little else to do, twelve people sit cooped up with their families, watching the other residents. Slowly, one family, a mother and daughter without the right clothes or the right manners, begin to draw attention. The novel’s shifting perspectives reveal unease beneath the ordinary, as observation turns to judgement and tension thickens. Precise, unsettling and socially attuned, it captures the brittleness of civility.

If you’re looking for: Multiple perspectives, social observation, simmering tension, class dynamics, atmosphere.

Great for fans of: Reservoir 13 by Jon McGregor, Ghost Wall by Sarah Moss, Jessie Burton.

What the experts say: 'Sharp, searching, thoroughly imagined, it is utterly of the moment, placing its anxious human dots against a vast indifferent landscape; with its wit and verve and beautiful organisation it throws much contemporary writing into the shade!' – Hilary Mantel, author of Wolf Hall.

Short books can be just as profound and moving as a long read, as Chetna Maroo's Booker-winning debut proves. Exploring themes of grief and sisterhood, this debut coming-of-age story packs all the feels into just 176 pages. Eleven-year-old Gopi has been playing squash for as long as she can remember. When her mother dies, her father enlists her in a brutal training regimen and soon, the game has become her entire world, causing a rift between Gopi and her sisters. But on the court, governed by the rhythms of the sport, she feels alive; the serve, the volley, the drive, the shot and its echo. This novel beautifully captures the ordinary as we follow a young athlete's struggle to transcend herself. 

Why read this: Exploring themes of grief and sisterhood, this Booker Prize-shortlisted debut packs a real punch in just 176 pages. Eleven-year-old Gopi has been playing squash for as long as she can remember. When her mother dies, her father enlists her in a brutal training regimen and soon, the game has become her entire world, causing a rift between Gopi and her sisters. But on the court, governed by the rhythms of the sport, she feels alive; the serve, the volley, the drive, the shot and its echo. This novel beautifully captures the ordinary as we follow a young athlete's struggle to transcend herself. 

If you’re looking for: Grief, sisterhood, sport, coming-of-age stories, minimalist prose.

Great for fans of: Aravind Adiga and Sunny Sahota
.
What the experts say: 'A beautiful and evocative novel about grief, about growing up, about losing and winning. The people and places in this book will stay with me for a long time.' – Sally Rooney, author of Normal People.

In a small back alley in Tokyo, there is a café which has been serving carefully brewed coffee for more than one hundred years. But this coffee shop offers its customers a unique experience: the chance to travel back in time. This opportunity is not without risks: customers must sit in a particular seat, they cannot leave the café, and finally, they must return to the present before the coffee gets cold . . . Toshikazu Kawaguchi’s beautiful novel has stolen the hearts of readers the world over. Through it, we meet four visitors to the café and ask: what would you change if you could travel back in time?

Beneath the shadow of the Hollywood sign, a mountain lion roams the drought-stricken hills of ‘ellay’, teetering on the edge of a dangerous hunger. This lion, queer and introspective, wrestles with more than just survival in a world shaped by human intrusion. Fascinated by the absurdities and desires of the people below, they confront a profound question: Do they long to consume a human, or to become one? As the lion navigates its identity and isolation, the lines between predator and prey blur, in a thought-provoking exploration of desire, transformation, and the meaning of belonging.

Arriving in San Miguel, Mexico, a destination chosen to help her improve her Spanish, from her native India, young student Bonita is anonymous and acutely aware of the possibility of adventure stretching out ahead of her. But, as she sits in a park, silently watching this unfamiliar world go by, she meets a stranger who swears she knew Bonita’s mother as an art student decades before. This woman’s revelation leads Bonita on a journey to learn the truth of who her mother once was; a journey that will change their relationship for good.

Set on a remote and unforgiving island off the coast of Wales, Whale Fall is the story of Manod, a young woman with dreams of a life different from the one she is destined for. With war on the horizon, a move to the mainland seems unlikely, until two anthropologists arrive to study the island’s unique way of life. Manod hatches a plan to befriend them and secure a passage to a new future. At 224 pages, Elizabeth O’Connor’s haunting and highly anticipated debut novel is a read you can enjoy in one sitting.

In a serene mountain photography studio, nestled between this world and the next, visitors at life’s end awaken to a profound task. Handed a cup of tea, they are asked to select their most treasured memories, captured in photos representing every day of their lives. These chosen moments will be placed in a lantern, which, once spun, will guide them into the afterlife. From a Yakuza remembering a time of kindness to a woman rebuilding a shattered community, their stories reveal the bittersweet beauty of life’s fleeting moments. The Lantern of Lost Memories is a luminous Japanese tale, exploring how we are shaped by the people and moments we hold dear.

Raven Leilani is a funny and original new voice in literary fiction. Her razor-sharp yet surprisingly tender debut is an essential novel about what it means to be young now. Edie is messing up her life, and no one seems to care. Then she meets Eric, who is white, middle-aged and comes with a wife who has sort-of-agreed to an open marriage and an adopted black daughter who doesn’t have a single person in her life who can show her how to do her hair. And as if life wasn’t hard enough, Edie finds herself falling head-first into Eric’s family. 

Freelancer proofreader Fuyuko is shy and solitary. About to turn thirty-five, she is haunted by her past encounters, and is unable to even imagine a successful relationship. But she has one friend, Hijiri, and she loves the light. On Christmas Eve, the night of her birthday, Fuyuko leaves her home to count the lights, and an encounter with physics teacher Mr. Mitsutsuka opens up another dimension. Poetic, pulsing and unexpected, this is the third novel by internationally bestselling writer Mieko Kawakami.