The ten best short novels under 150 pages – chosen by experts

Events & Activities booksliterature The ten best short novels under 150 pages – chosen by experts Photo The Italian Writers Italo Calvino And Alberto Moravia Photographed At The Einaudi Bookstore On Via Vittorio Veneto In Rome 1962 Touring Club Italiano 11 5418 Relevant News The ten best short novels under 150 pages – chosen by experts 29 July 2026 Our own Odyssey: The journey back to ourselves 29 July 2026 Bird Aviation signs seven-year base maintenance deal with easyJet 29 July 2026 newsroom 29 July 2026 FacebookXWhatsAppEmailPrintViber A novel doesn’t need to be a hefty tome to change your life. Forget War and Peace (1,200 pages) or Les Misérables (1,400 pages); these expert recommendations are under 150 pages – short enough to tear through over a weekend. Train Dreams by Denis Johnson (2011) In 2012, Denis Johnson’s Train Dreams did not win the Pulitzer prize. Though shortlisted as one of three finalists, the committee “withheld” the fiction award for the first time in 35 years, because none of the works received a majority from the panel. It was as though the judges were spooked by Johnson’s slim novella. Though it poses as a simple addition to the western frontier genre, it soon unsettles the confidence of America’s founding myths with unnerving echoes, tangents and coincidences. In fewer than 150 short pages, Train Dreams follows the building of the transcontinental railroad through the life of an orphaned logger, Robert Grainier. When Grainier’s family disappear in a terrible forest fire, he fears his work as a tree cutter has wrought the vengeance of an abused natural environment. Johnson’s novella riffs on the story of the American Dream and transforms it into an ethereal tale of settler colonial conquest, indentured labour and ecological grief. Dominic Davies is a reader in English The Lonely Londoners by Samuel Selvon (1956) A disenchanted narrator, Moses Aloetta, makes his way to Waterloo to meet newly arrived Windrush immigrants from Trinidad and Jamaica. In London, almost a decade later, he has become a grudging source of support, finding lodgings and work. The prose slips between the narrative perspectives of “the boys”, as the group call themselves. Modernist in style (with similarities to Virginia Woolf and James Joyce), the shifting internal monologue has a mostly chronological structure, but it is written in non-standard English to reflect Trinidadian dialect. The slim novel conveys “gold and grey”: grim rented rooms and persistent racism, alongside the wonder of postcolonial flaneurs newly encountering the city. Suspending his often-threatened return home for another year, at the novel’s end, Moses senses golden hope at the dock of the Thames. The boys hear the summer evening’s soft laughter as tugboats pass and Moses anticipates writing a book about his everyday life, one “what everybody would buy”. Published 70 years ago, The Lonely Londoners was out of print for decades; now it is rightfully recognised as one of the most important short novels in the world. Jenni Ramone is an associate professor of postcolonial and global literature Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence by Doris Pilkington Garimara (1996) Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence is based on Doris Pilkington Garimara’s experience as part of Australia’s stolen generation. This term refers to predominantly mixed-race Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children who were forcibly removed from their families by governments, churches and welfare bodies. They were placed in institutions or with non-Indigenous families to be assimilated into white communities from the early 1900s until the 1970s. This book portrays the removal of the author’s mother, aunt and cousin to the Moore River Native Settlement in western Australia and their subsequent escape. Molly, Daisy and Gracie use the thousand-mile fence through the Australian outback to navigate towards their home in Jigalong. The novel is one of the most popular and accessible accounts of the Stolen Generation, compellingly combining resistance and adventure narratives. Sarah Olive is a senior lecturer in communication and culture Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino (1972) Invisible Cities has a cult following. While not widely known outside literary circles it’s well loved by those who have encountered its sumptuous prose. Italo Calvino’s novella is made up of 55 short descriptions of imaginary cities. Venetian merchant and explorer Marco Polo tells these stories to Kublai Khan, the Mongol emperor, as he describes the vast empire in the 13th century. The variety of ideas explored in these depictions illustrate the writer’s immense creativity. While the framing conversation between Kublai and Polo keeps these ideas moving in a linear fashion, the reader eventually comes to realise the vignettes can be read in any order. Calvino was a member of the OuLiPo school of writing, a group of predominantly French writers who used mathematical forms to inspire their experimental fiction. The style is on full display in this ethereal, dreamlike novella, which, while a quick read, offers a profound experience. Matthew Leggatt is a senior lecturer in English and American literature Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead by Barbara Comyns (1954) If the idea of a short mid-20th-century novel about an English village suggests something mannered or prim, Barbara Comyns’ Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead (1954) will come as an audacious surprise. The novel opens with ducks swimming through the windows of the Willoweed family home after a flood bursts them open. A plague of insanity follows when the butcher, the miller, then 19 others take their own lives after rampaging through the village lanes. Avril Horner, Comyns’ biographer, explains that, drawn to “the extraordinary and the macabre”, Comyns based her tale on a real French tragedy when villagers were poisoned by a fungus in bread. Her version, both grotesque and exuberant (mealsconsist of “soggy bread that smelt of paraffin” and “fish paste with green mould on top”), is ultimately an account of the constraints and responsibilities of family life and who can escape them. Tory Young is an associate professor in English literature Grief Is the Thing with Feathers by Max Porter (2015) It’s hard to believe that Grief is the Thing with Feathers was Max Porter’s debut. This short knotted-string dream of a read will keep you in a cosy headlock. Porter’s book is written in three voices: boys, dad and crow. Following their mother’s sudden death, two boys and their father – a scruffy Ted Hughes scholar – are visited by a mysterious bird, who threatens to stay until they no longer need him. Between benevolent teacher and malevolent jester, the crow offers refuge for the reader’s own experiences. Like grief itself, the book’s meaning remains a cryptic mystery, shifting between chronologies and perspectives. Equal parts witty and moving, Porter’s novel is poetry in disguise. Unflinching in its portrayal of love and loss, Grief is the Thing with Feathers leaves a lasting mark. Jade King is a teaching fellow in creative writing In Watermelon Sugar by Richard Brautigan (1968) I bought my first Brautigan book because the front cover featured a cool guy in a Stetson and, on the back, was simply the word “mayonnaise”. Inside, I found a writer with a lighter touch than the other counter-cultural “beats”, who was also funnier. Watermelon’s narrator lives in iDEATH, a strange, potentially post-apocalyptic commune (explanations not provided). He recounts how lives in iDEATH are constructed from watermelon sugar, which makes up part of his house and furniture too. What’s watermelon sugar? Brautigan doesn’t say. Nor does he explain what watermelontrout oil is (and that’s crucial). But who cares? There’s a love story here and a rebellion featuring the insidious inBOIL (and mythical tigers). The novel is spoken through a unique voice created from prose of such grace that you feel like a prayer is being spoken inside you. Adam Baron is a novelist and associate professor in creative writing Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan (2021) I’m surprised this title emerged as my favourite novella, solely because I do love a happy ending. I can’t recall my first foray into Claire Keegan’s fiction, though I’m an avid reader and advocate of her seductive writing. Eloquently and succinctly, this story confronts without compromise recent historical treatment of women in the care of the Catholic church in Ireland. Bill Furlong is extra busy delivering coal but not too busy to notice inexplicable cruelty at the local convent and assimilate this into his very being. Privy to a complicit community, I tensely tailed Furlong’s circular thoughts, the injustices surrounding a life – the “small things like these”. Just as well it’s an afternoon’s read. In creating a compassionate protagonist, Keegan suggests amid unspeakable horrors there were people who in defiance of enforced silence became quiet heroes. This is heartwarming. But I finished the book tormented by Furlong’s personal cost. Colleen Ballard is a lecturer in English The Breast by Philip Roth (1972) David Kepesh, one of Philip Roth’s precociously smart and over-sexed alter egos, wakes up one morning to find himself transformed into an enormous human breast. The grotesque motif is narrated in disarming quasi-realistic detail, including the medical interventions needed to keep Kepesh alive, and how he manages to amuse himself by listening to recordings of great literature. An early esprit from the young novelist in the 1970s, The Breast is often interpreted in relation to psychoanalysis and the unacknowledged femininity that may lurk within the voraciously hetero male. Roth being Roth, he wants you to know he’s aware of writing in an intertextual web. He delivers some of the allusions explicitly to his reader – including Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis (1915), and Nikolai Gogol’s arguably even more surreal The Nose (1836). Sadly, Roth wasn’t alive to read Ian McEwan’s Brexit allegory The Cockroach (2019), which might have tickled him. Roth’s novella concludes beautifully with a full quotation of Rainer Maria Rilke’s poem Archaic Torso of Apollo. It’s another meditation on the alienating human body, with its haunting final sentence: “You must change your life.” Michael Bradshaw is dean of Humanities and Social Sciences. The Outsider by Albert Camus (1942) Following the death of his mother, Meursault, a French-Algerian office worker in the 1930s, attends her funeral with apparent emotional detachment. After beginning a relationship with a young woman who worked in the same office, he then becomes involved with a neighbour’s violent dispute. His life changes dramatically when he shoots a young “Arab” man on a sun-drenched beach. It leads to his imprisonment and a trial to which he remains a detached observer. It’s an apparently simple, tragic story. But it’s compellingly written, and the spare prose conceals profound questions about morality, society and human existence. The English title fixes the status of Meursault. But in the French title – L’Étranger – multiple meanings come into play: stranger, foreigner, outsider … all reflecting the novel’s ambiguities. The sensuality of the sun and the sea are also central to the story, rooted in Camus’s love of Algeria. The colonial context is politically contested, but this is a transcendent moral fable powerfully confronting the absurdity of existence. Debra Kelly is a principal research fellow in French and Francophone studies (The Conversation via Reuters Connect) Subscribe to our Newsletter Latest News Our own Odyssey: The journey back to ourselves Bird Aviation signs seven-year base maintenance deal with easyJet Half of England declared in drought Cyprus to make AI Olympiad debut with two teams in Kazakhstan Yellow heat warning issued as Cyprus braces for 40C highs UN rights office warns of worsening settler violence in West Bank British woman found dead in suitcase entered Greece via Cyprus, police say Follow en.philenews on Google News and be the first to know all the news about Cyprus and the world.