20 Best Short Novels Under 200 Pages, Ranked by Length

Gregor Samsa wakes one morning as a giant insect, and Kafka spends almost no time on how or why. The whole book is about what happens next: the locked bedroom door, the family on the other side of it, the salary he was bringing home that has now stopped. Everyone in that flat adapts to the situation faster than you expect them to, and that is the part which stays with you. I read it on a Sunday afternoon and then sat very still for a while. The Norton edition by Susan Bernofsky moves cleanly in English, which not every Kafka translation manages.

Two men play chess on an ocean liner. One is the reigning champion, a peasant boy with no interests outside the board and no conversation at all. The other is a Viennese lawyer who survived months of Gestapo isolation with nothing but a stolen book of chess games, which he memorised until the games began playing themselves inside his skull. Zweig wrote this in Brazil in 1941, shortly before his death, and the exile sits in every page. The tension does not come from the match. It comes from watching a mind that has already broken once being asked to do the thing that broke it.

It is 1985 in a small Irish town and Bill Furlong sells coal and timber. He is a decent man with five daughters and a business that runs on everyone in town continuing to like him. In the weeks before Christmas he makes a delivery to the local convent and sees something he cannot unsee. Keegan is very good on ordinary work: cold hands, weather, the smell of a coal yard in December. Almost nothing happens for sixty pages, and then one small act becomes the largest thing in the book.

Binya is a hill girl who sees a blue silk umbrella belonging to a group of picnickers and wants it so badly that she hands over her leopard claw pendant for it. After that the umbrella becomes the most discussed object in the village, and the local shopkeeper decides he has to have it. Bond writes children and shopkeepers with exactly the same seriousness, which is why this still works when you are thirty. It is a story about wanting a thing, getting it, and then finding out what the wanting does to everyone around you.

A pilot goes down in the desert with limited water and meets a child who wants a drawing of a sheep. Over the next few days the boy describes the planets he has visited and the men living on them: a king with no subjects, a businessman counting stars he believes he owns, a lamplighter who cannot stop working. Then he talks about a rose he left behind. It is written like a children's book and read mostly by adults, which tells you something about both. The famous line about seeing clearly with the heart is earned by then, not decorative.

The narrator sits in a Bangalore coffee house talking to a waiter he treats as a kind of confessor. His family used to be poor and packed into a small house with an ant problem. Then an uncle started a spice business, money arrived, and the family closed ranks around it in ways that get uglier the longer you look at them. The title is a nonsense phrase the family uses for something tangled past fixing. Shanbhag wrote it in Kannada, and the English by Srinath Perur is among the cleanest translations from an Indian language I have read.

Ethan runs a dying farm in a Massachusetts village where winter shuts everything down for months. His wife Zeena is ill, or says she is, and her young cousin Mattie has come to help around the house. What happens between Ethan and Mattie is mostly silence and small kindnesses, which Wharton makes almost unbearable to sit through. The book opens with a narrator meeting Ethan decades later, so you know from page one that something went badly wrong, and then you watch it go wrong in slow motion.

Keiko has never worked out what other people want from her. The store solves it: there is a manual, a script, a uniform, and one correct way to greet a customer walking through the door. Outside the store she is a thirty-six-year-old woman whose family and friends keep asking why there is no husband and no career, so she begins improvising a life that will pass inspection. It is funny in a flat, deadpan way for seventy pages and then turns into a real argument about how much of ourselves we perform for people who are not even watching closely.

Siddhartha leaves his father's house, tries starving himself with a group of ascetics, meets the Buddha and politely declines to become a follower, then goes the other way entirely: money, a courtesan, appetite, and the slow rot that comes with all three. Late in the book he ends up beside a river with a ferryman and finally starts listening. Hesse was a German writing about India in 1922, so the India in these pages is a European idea of one, and the book works far better as a parable than as a portrait.

George is small and quick, Lennie is enormous and slow, and they move from ranch to ranch across Depression-era California because Lennie keeps getting them chased out of towns. Their plan is a few acres of their own, described between them so often that it works like a bedtime story. Steinbeck built it almost as a play: mostly rooms, mostly dialogue, very little scenery to get lost in. You can see the ending coming from a long way off and it does not help you at all, which is exactly the design.

Santiago has gone eighty-four days without a fish, the boy who used to crew with him has been moved to a luckier boat, and he rows out much further than anybody sensible would. What follows is one man alone with a fish he cannot see, for days, talking to himself and to his own cramping hands. The sentences are short and repeated on purpose. Whether that reads as hypnotic or as a famous writer performing depends entirely on your mood, and I have felt both about this book inside the same year.

Miss Jean Brodie teaches at a girls' school in 1930s Edinburgh and considers herself to be in her prime. She selects six students, tells them about art and Italy and her own love life, and hands them opinions she has no business handing to children. Spark reveals early which girl does the betraying, then keeps jumping forward and back in time so you spend the whole book watching for it. The tone is light and the content is not: this is a story about influence, and about how flattering it feels to be chosen by someone impressive.

Meursault gets a telegram saying his mother has died, attends the funeral without visible grief, goes swimming the next day, and later shoots a man on a beach in Algiers under a sun the book will not stop mentioning. His trial spends more time on his behaviour at that funeral than on the killing itself. Camus writes in short flat sentences that hold you at arm's length from a narrator already at arm's length from himself. The Matthew Ward translation is the one to get, because older English versions smooth him out into something more polite.

A young writer in a New York brownstone becomes fascinated by his neighbour, a woman who takes money from men, keeps a cat she refuses to name, and calls her worst days the mean reds. He loves her without ever quite entering her story. Capote's Holly is nineteen, running from something very specific in her past, and considerably tougher than the film allows her to be. This Penguin edition also carries three stories, of which House of Flowers is worth your time. The ending is not the one you have seen on screen.

Nick Carraway rents a small house on Long Island beside an enormous one belonging to Jay Gatsby, who throws parties for hundreds of people he has never met. Gatsby has money nobody can account for and exactly one purpose: Daisy, married, living across the bay with a rich husband who is openly awful to everyone. The plot is thin on purpose. What carries the book is Nick's voice, and the closing page is the most famous ending in American fiction because the previous 159 pages actually earn it.

Yeong-hye has a violent dream and decides to stop eating meat. That is the entire trigger. The book comes in three parts, narrated by her husband, her brother-in-law and her sister, and she never gets to tell her own story, which is the whole point of the design. Her family's response escalates from irritation to force. It is a book about a woman withdrawing consent from everything, food, sex, speech, her own body, and about the people who cannot allow her to do it. The middle section is the most uncomfortable stretch of reading on this list.

Irene and Clare grew up together in Chicago. Irene is now a respectable Harlem wife who passes for white occasionally, when it is convenient in a hotel tea room. Clare has passed permanently and married a white man who does not know, and who says racist things at his own dinner table while she sits there. Clare starts coming back to Harlem, pulled by the thing she gave up, and Irene cannot work out whether she is jealous, frightened or attracted. Larsen writes in a clipped drawing-room style that hides how much pressure is building underneath it.

The animals of Manor Farm drive out their drunk owner and set up their own society with seven commandments painted on the barn wall. The pigs take charge of the thinking, the carthorse takes charge of the work, and the commandments start getting quietly edited overnight. Orwell wrote it about Stalin's Soviet Union, but nothing in it stays in 1945: any reader in any country will finish it able to name real people for most of the animals. The Collins edition runs 161 pages with generous margins, so it goes faster than that number suggests.

Merricat is eighteen, lives with her older sister Constance and their frail uncle, and does the weekly shopping in a village that hates all three of them. Six years earlier most of the family died of arsenic in the sugar bowl. Constance was tried and acquitted. Merricat narrates, and she is one of the great untrustworthy voices in fiction: superstitious, funny, fiercely protective and clearly capable of anything at all. Jackson makes a domestic routine feel like a spell being maintained daily, then sends a cousin to the front door to break it.

Mano Majra is a small village sitting on the new border, and through the summer of 1947 it has stayed mostly untouched by what is happening elsewhere. Then a train pulls in loaded with bodies and the village has to decide what kind of place it actually is. Singh moves between a village strongman in love with a Muslim girl, a nervous magistrate, and a young communist who has read a great deal and understood very little of it. The prose is unfussy and almost reportorial, which is what makes the final thirty pages so hard to get through.