All of us love a good tome that we can really sink our teeth into, but there’s also something immensely satisfying about a book that finishes quickly, but stays with you for a very long time. There are many reasons to love these books. Apart from the fact that they make for excellent bridges between the other, more demanding ones (starting a 950+ page book, for example, often needs careful planning), there’s also that added satisfaction of entering, and exiting, a new world in a single-sitting.
Here’s our pick of some of the finest quick reads out there, all under 200 pages, that are perfect for the busy reader, the daily commuter, or really, anyone at all looking for a great story:
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The Driver’s Seat by Muriel Spark (Fiction, 128 pages): The tension in The Driver’s Seat builds slowly, but the hint of menace is always there. It’s a book that can, perhaps, be best described as unnerving and off-kilter. Lisa, the protagonist, walks out of her life seemingly out of the blue, and into a vacation that is anything but ordinary. Spark never quite lays it all out for you, and this is a book where every line, every word, hints at another, and is quite heavy and ominous with meaning.
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Kitchen by Banana Yoshimoto; Translated from the Japanese by Megan Backus (Fiction, 120 pages): Yoshimoto’s debut novel is charming, albeit unsophisticated — the style almost painfully vulnerable, and there’s so much about the story that feels exposed and raw. However, it’s exactly these things that catch at you, and leave a lump in your throat; the way you can almost smell and touch some parts of the book, the way it transports you to places that feel familiar and intimate. As you live with Mikage’s grief, who is the story’s young protagonist, everything feels seeped in sorrow, but there is relief in snatches of pure, unadulterated delight and pleasure, always in the kitchen. Yoshimoto, quite simply, succeeds in making you feel everything Mikage is feeling.
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Devils in Daylight by Junichiro Tanizaki; Translated from the Japanese by J. Keith Vincent (Fiction, 96 pages): Here’s a book that will feel like many things at once — a Hitchcockian thriller, a contemplation on sex, voyeurism and morality, a fever dream infused with nervous anticipation and just a smidgeon of absurdity. It’s a mystery, of course, so we’ll let it stay a mystery — suffice to say that secret cryptographic codes crafted by Edgar Allan Poe and possible murders, expertly handled by a master like Tanizaki, make for immensely satisfying books.
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Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton (Fiction, 128 pages): On one hand, if you’re familiar with Wharton’s more popular works like The Age of Innocence and The House of Mirth, Ethan Frome might feel, on the surface of it, like a departure. No Gilded Age explorations here, but a bleak landscape, and the examination of a life mired in it. But the story is still classic Wharton — a deeply layered examination of the inner world of a poor farmer, a world of tragedy, despair and austerity. And it’s a world laid out with so much understanding and empathy that it becomes, in its darkness, a thing of beauty. Read it to marvel at Wharton’s skill, and to watch Ethan Frome come alive before you.
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The Island of Doctor Moreau by H.G. Wells (Fiction, 160 pages): The premise of The Island of Doctor Moreau is both simple — a man trapped on an island with a scientific genius and his fanstastic, beastly creations — and incredibly complicated: what happens when you begin to understand, and challenge, the idea of humanity in the first place. Who is human? Who, or what, qualifies as human and what does it even mean? And if you are not human, where is your place in the order of things? On both these levels, it works as a frightening, unsettling story, and for both reasons, you might find that it spawns nightmares. A lesser known work by Wells that undoubtedly deserves more attention.
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Simple Passion by Annie Ernaux; Translated from the French by Tanya Leslie (Fiction, 67 pages): Ernaux’s stark, almost dispassionate style, used so effectively to look into the face of all-consuming passion and what it does to a person, could well be the triumph of this book. You wonder at how much a single line can make you feel; you find yourself going over it, again and again, to understand why it cuts so deep, or says so much. But then there is also the raw honestly that sits at its centre, like an open wound that inspires awe. This is both a very difficult book about passion, and a very moving portrait of it.
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Baba Dunja’s Last Love by Alina Bronsky; Translated from the German by Tim Mohr (Fiction, 192 pages): If you want a heroine to cheer for, here comes Baba Dunja, who has returned to her village in the winter of her life. This village is, in fact, a hotbed of radiation in the post-Chernobyl world, and there have been Government warnings against entering it. But Baba Dunja doesn’t care about that. She just wants to spend her remaining time with the few neighbours she has left, and write letters to a granddaughter she has never met. And while there is so much death, decay and disease in it, Bronsky’s book becomes, through its cast of characters and its heroine, a celebration of life and of human spirit. Not much happens in the story, really, except that you get to spend a lot of time with Baba Dunja, and that is indeed as you’ll discover, a privilege.
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Legal Fiction by Chandan Pandey; Translated from Hindi by Bharatbhooshan Tiwari (Fiction, 168 pages): A thriller that carries at its core the idea of truth, of storytelling, and of the tussle between the two. The story, which revolves around a missing person and a writer who wants to know more and dig deeper, Legal Fiction contains all the markers of a great mystery, but sets it against our world — a familiar, difficult and violent world. It is, also, ultimately a good story told well, one that will race ahead breathlessly, restlessly, and carry you with it.
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Ghachar Ghochar by Vivek Shanbhag; Translated from the Kannada by Srinath Perur (Fiction, 128 pages): Impossible, perhaps, to put together this list without talking about Ghachar Ghochar, Vivek Shanbhag’s stunningly crafted story about a family unravelling as they grapple with changing fortunes, and the fraying knots that tie it together. There is a sense of surrealness and hyper-reality all at once, and somehow, through what is a deceptively simple style laced with humour and an appreciation for the absurd, Shanbhagh manages to convey a sense of foreboding that lingers through the story.
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Whereabouts by Jhumpa Lahiri; Translated from the Italian by Jhumpa Lahiri (Fiction, 176 pages): Whereabouts is an exploration of movement, of belonging and not-belonging, of experiencing a city full of people, and of looking in the face of dense, dark solitude. As the unnamed protagonist of the story observes the world around her, and as her thoughts move from one thing to the next, the reader is carried along on a journey, floating through words and pictures and scenes as they shift quickly, the movement silken and soft, and always rich in small, quick details.
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Elevation By Stephen King (Fiction, 192 pages): A strange book, Elevation frustrates perhaps as much as it pleases, but the premise itself is intriguing — of a man who is losing weight daily, without looking any thinner. What will happen when he reaches zero? This is King playing with an idea — a what if — and letting you in as he puts together the blocks. It’s a fantastic little book to get into if you haven’t read King yet, because it sets you up nicely for all the dark little treasures lying in wait.
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84, Charing Cross Road by Helene Hanff (Non-Fiction, 98 pages): This is a book about books, and a book about the love of books bringing people together. This is also a love story, though not a romantic one. In it, you get a ringside seat to a friendship. You get to see how it begins, and then how it blooms, its evidence frozen in time, in a charming little book full of the letters that flew back and forth between the American Hanff and English antiquarian bookseller, Frank Doel
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Sempre Susan by Sigrid Nunez (Memoir, 128 pages): A very personal portrait of one writer by another, Sempre Susan is immediately attractive given its premise. Nunez, Sontag’s assistant and an aspiring writer, was also dating Sontag’s son, David Rieff. Soon after they began dating, Nunez moved in with Sontag and Rieff. The book looks at her life with Sontag during that brief period of time. It’s intimate and personal, at times not very flattering, and ultimately, a fascinating, lively window into the world of literary and intellectual elites.
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That Long Silence by Shashi Deshpande (Fiction, 188 pages): There’s a sense of frustration, of thwarted dreams, and of a life run off-course, in Deshpande’s book. Its protagonist, Sarita lives almost entirely in her memories. And as the world around her begins to implode, each change pushes her further into the past, which she examines with a critical, disappointed eye. The road, from her childhood to her marriage, seems strewn with constraints and failures, and Sarita must begin to reset the course of her life. Deshpande, as always, writes with depth and subtlety, and with an eye on the larger truths that sit alongside Sarita’s very personal journey.
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The Victorian Chaise Lounge by Margharita Laski (Fiction, 99 pages): In some way, Laski’s book is a horror story, though overtly, it is about time travel. Melanie, its protagonist, is a young woman living in post World War-II London. She’s been ill, and one day, she goes to sleep in her Victorian chaise-lounge. She wakes up as Millie in the 1860s, and everything that happens to her from there on feels like a disturbing, surreal dream. Considerations about women and the ways in which they can find themselves trapped, both physically and mentally, loom large in the narrative. The story itself, expertly told, works to drive home Melanie/Millie’s unravelling sense of identity and time.