All these novels have fewer than 200 pages, some of them fewer than 100. Together they make up the first couple of batches of books in my family’s Small Book Club, which is designed to get us all reading despite our shriveled brains and crippling TikTok habits.
If you know of other brilliant reads that run to fewer than 200 pages, please leave a comment!
More about this idea on the blog: Nabokov vs Hugo. Also, I know some of these look like they’re actually longer than 200 pages but that’s usually because they’ve got long introductions and afterwords and so on (or I’ve just added them by mistake), so, you know…
Batch two
We have Always Lived in the Castle (176 pages), Shirley Jackson (review).
Memorial (96 pages), Alice Oswald (not actually a novel).
The Hothouse by the East River (144 pages), Muriel Spark.
The Word for the World is Forest (190 pages), Ursula K. Le Guin.
Notes from Underground (160 pages), Fyodor Dostoevsky.
The Nose (40 pages), Nikolay Gogol.
Faraway, the Southern Sky (96 pages), Joseph Andras.
To be Taught, if Fortunate: a Novella (136 pages), Becky Chambers.
Hour of the Star (96 pages), Clarice Lispector (review).
Who was Changed and who was Dead (218 pages), Barbara Comyns.
The Hole (96 pages), Hiroko Oyamada.
This is How You Lose the Time War (209 pages), Amal El-Mohtar.
The Diary of a Nobody (176 pages), George and Weedon Grossmith.
Mrs Dalloway (194 pages), Virginia Woolf (review).
In Watermelon Sugar (160 pages), Richard Brautigan (review).
Silas Marner (176 pages), George Eliot.
Batch one
Autumn Quail (176 pages), Naguib Mahfouz (review).
Train Dreams (128 pages), Denis Johnson (review).
The Eye (96 pages), Vladimir Nabokov (review).
Pnin (176 pages), Vladimir Nabokov.
We are Made of Diamond Stuff (128 pages), Isabel Waidner
L.A. Woman (160 pages), Eve Babitz.
A Good Man is Hard to Find (48 pages), Flannery O’Connor.
The Royal Game: A Chess Story (112 pages), Stefan Zweig.
The Summer Book: A Novel (156 pages), Tove Jansson.
Strange Weather in Tokyo (220 pages), Hiromi Kawakami.
Bonjour Tristesse (240 pages), Françoise Sagan.
Giovanni’s Room (160 pages), James Baldwin.
The Postman Always Rings Twice (128 pages), James M. Cain.
The Invention of Morel (120 pages), Adolfo Bioy Casares.
Push (240 pages), Sapphire.
Death in Venice (142 pages), Thomas Mann.
Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (100 pages), Robert Louis Stephenson (review).
The Inseperables (176 pages), Simone de Beauvoir.