Best Short Literary Novels Under 200 Pages

A coal merchant in a small Irish town in 1985 makes a discovery at the local convent in the weeks before Christmas. Every sentence does work, and it is the clearest modern example of how much a short novel can hold.

One caveat: Its subject is the Magdalene laundries. Quietly told, but not light.

Six astronauts on the International Space Station across a single day of sixteen orbits. There is almost no plot and it needs none: it is a meditation on the Earth seen from above.

An old Cuban fisherman hooks an enormous marlin far out at sea and fights it for days. Spare and simple on the surface, and very hard to forget.

Two childhood friends meet again in 1920s Chicago, and one of them has been living as a white woman, even to her husband. Tense, compact and built toward an ending readers still argue about.

A woman who has worked the same convenience store for eighteen years is perfectly happy there, which everyone around her finds unbearable. Deadpan, strange and very funny about the pressure to live a normal life.

Two girls bound together in childhood in a small Ohio town, and what happens when one of them leaves and comes back. Toni Morrison at her most concentrated.

The whole life of a day laborer in the early twentieth-century West, from railroad camps to a solitary old age. Spare, strange and moving — a big life in a very small book.

Japanese picture brides arriving in San Francisco in the early twentieth century, told in a collective 'we' rather than by any one woman. It builds toward the internment camps of the Second World War, and the unusual voice makes the history feel shared.