8 Short Novels Your Book Club Will Actually Read (and Love)

Put aside the doorstoppers and consider these picks of 250 pages or less

Maria Speidel,

AARP

Comments

Published August 13, 2024

The Nickel Boys, Margaret the First, Weather, The English Understand Wool, The Perfect Nanny, Tinkers, Orbital and Small Things Like These book covers

Photo Collage: AARP; (Source: Vintage (2); Catapult; New Directions; Penguin Books; Bellevue Literary Press; Grove Press (2); Getty Images (2))

It happens to countless book clubs: You start out with great intentions of reading brilliant weighty novels, taking on books like Barbara Kingsolver’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Demon Copperhead (560 pages) or Abraham Verghese’s epic The Covenant of Water (736 pages). They’re fantastic, but many members of your group just don’t have the time or motivation to plow through them and your discussions fizzle.

So consider these lighter (physically), also-wonderful novels — many of them award winners, most with compelling characters of all ages — that everyone in your club should have time to enjoy.

Vintage

The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead, 224 pages

Whitehead won his second Pulitzer Prize (his first was for 2016’s The Underground Railroad) for this gripping 2019 story about a scholarly teen, Ellwood Curtis, who suffers stunning injustices at a reform school for boys in Florida. A deep dive into the corrupt heart of the Jim Crow South, it’s based on the horrific happenings at a real-life segregated reform school, the Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys in Florida. The action slides back and forth from the fictionalized Nickel Academy in the 1960s to New York in the 2010s, when, after the secret graves of abused boys are found at Nickel, Ellwood relives the suffering he experienced while there. Read it before the movie comes out this fall.

Catapult

Margaret the First by Danielle Dutton, 155 pages

This 2016 fictionalized biography fits into a popular trend in storytelling: reimagining the lives of notable, but often overlooked, women from history. Here the focus is on the 17th-century feminist Margaret Cavendish, who was known as Mad Madge for her unconventional exploits. While working for the royal household, she meets and marries William Cavendish, and becomes a duchess — then, with her husband’s encouragement, a writer, science fiction pioneer, fledgling scientist and daring fashionista who once attended the theater in a topless dress. Considered totally wild in her day, she became a favorite of the tabloids. It’s an entertaining story rich with historical details.

Vintage

Weather by Jenny Offill, 224 pages

Offill’s bestselling 2020 novel is written in the bite-size, stream-of-consciousness paragraphs of the clear-eyed first-person voice of Lizzie Benson, a librarian at a New York City university who stresses over her dog, husband, son, needy library patrons, religious mom and ex-addict brother. Her bandwidth is stretched further when Sylvia, her former mentor and a successful podcaster, hires Lizzie to answer letters written by the doomsday preppers who listen to her podcast, Hell and High Water. Oh, the 2016 election is taking place too. Offill engagingly portrays a woman mauled by the mundane and monumental.

New Directions

The English Understand Wool by Helen Dewitt, 64 pages

This twisted tale — a sneaky send-up of the truth behind tabloid headlines and our obsession with scandal — can be lapped up quickly, making for an entertaining evening on the couch. (It’s even delightfully sized, the shape of a medium-sized children’s book.) Readers meet Marguerite, a 17-year-old Marrakesh-based heiress ensconced with her Maman at London’s Claridge’s hotel. The duo is fresh off procuring woolens from the Outer Hebrides and linen from Ireland to be made into outfits by Maman’s London tailor and a Thai seamstress on retainer in Paris. Maman is full of bon mots on avoiding mauvais ton, or bad taste, but silent on some rather crucial matters, and things quickly go sideways. Last fall the author and bookstore owner Ann Patchett praised Dewitt’s book on TikTok, calling it “the best thing, ever. This is the strangest, most subversive, clever, fabulous, funny, wild, tiny, gorgeous read.”

Penguin Books

The Perfect Nanny by Leïla Slimani, 228 pages

This thriller is a heartbreaking, suspenseful study on class, race, motherhood and gender that opens with a chilling sentence: “The baby is dead.” Slimani then forensically reveals the damaged psyche of lonely, destitute Louise, the seemingly selfless nanny who murders the two children of comfortable Parisians Myriam and Paul. At first, Louise solved so many problems for the couple, offering them, among other things, a spotless house and delicious cooking. But the ease Louise brings allows Myriam and Paul to overlook some developing tensions. Based on a real-life Manhattan killing, the novel and is being turned into an HBO series with Nicole Kidman and Maya Erskine. The Moroccan-French author is also a French diplomat; her book won the Prix Goncourt, France’s top literary prize.

Bellevue Literary Press

Tinkers by Paul Harding, 191 pages

A 2010 Pulitzer Prize winner, this is an epic, generation-spanning story in a small package. George Washington Crosby, an elderly clock repairman, is lying near death in a rented hospital bed stationed in the living room of the house he built. George starts hallucinating episodes from his life, as well as the life of his long-deceased father, a tinker. Harding’s rendering of George and family with evocative details — like the way George stashes the cash proceeds from his clock-repair business in safe deposit boxes at six different banks — builds into a beautiful elegy to flawed, wonderful, ordinary lives.

Grove Press

Orbital by Samantha Harvey, 224 pages

Recently longlisted for the 2024 Booker Prize, Orbital is a lyrical, thought-provoking story focused on one day on the international space station. “Rotating about the earth in their spacecraft they are so together, and so alone, that even their thoughts, their internal mythologies, at times convene,” Harvey writes of the craft’s six occupants. Orbital’s 16 chapters represent the 16 revolutions of the earth the spaceship makes in 24 hours. While astronauts eat, sleep and do their space jobs, Harvey gets at the sheer outer-worldliness of it all: In weightlessness, Pietro feels his body dissolving; if he stayed long enough, he thinks, would he become something amphibious, like a tadpole? Nell, the meteorologist, watches a typhoon grow over Asia and thinks of it as the earth emoting. The author has said she wanted the novel to avoid sci-fi fantasies of space.

Grove Press

Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan, 118 pages

Irish writer Claire Keegan made big splashes with her slim bestselling novellas Foster (62 pages) and this 2021 gem. It poses the question: How does an individual confront institutionalized abuse? It’s Ireland in 1985, and it will be eight years before the crimes of Ireland’s infamous Magdalene laundries (workhouses/prisons for “fallen women” run by Roman Catholic orders) jump from village gossip to national headlines. Coal merchant Bill Furlong clocks the tiny cruelties of daily life but rarely steps out of his routine as a busy family man. While making deliveries at the local convent, he has a series of unsettling encounters with young women. These events bring a reckoning with his own heritage and heart. Watch for the upcoming movie adaptation, starring Cillian Murphy.

%{postComment}%