Novellas (Read a short book)
May 3, 2022
Check out some fantastic quick reads with these books that are all under 200 pages!
The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman
Dark creatures from beyond the world are on the loose, and it will take everything our narrator has just to stay alive. His only defense is three women, on a farm at the end of the lane. The youngest of them claims that her duckpond is ocean. The oldest can remember the Big Bang.
Book / Large Print / eBook / CD Audiobook / Audio eBook
Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? by Lorrie Moore
A tale of music and memory and the journey into adulthood. Berie Carr recalls for us the summer of 1972, when she and her best friend, Sills, were 15. Driven by their restlessness, and making their own loose rules, they embark on a summer that both shatters and intensifies the bond between them.
The Time Machine by H.G. Wells
When a Victorian scientist propels himself into future, he is delighted to find that suffering has been replaced by beauty, contentment and peace. He soon realizes, however, that this beauty hides a dark and terrible secret, and all is not as perfect as it seems.
Book / Large Print / eBook / Audio eBook
Flatland by Edwin A. Abbott
A mathematical adventure set in a two-dimensional plane world, populated by a hierarchical society of regular geometrical figures-who think and speak and have all too human emotions. By imagining the contact of beings from different dimensions, the author fully exploited the power of the analogy between the limitations of humans and those of his two-dimensional characters.
Book / eBook / CD Audiobook / Audio eBook
The Turn of the Screw by Henry James
A young governess is sent to a country house to take charge of two orphans, Miles and Flora. Unsettled by a dark foreboding of menace within the house, she soon comes to believe that something malevolent is stalking the children in her care. But is the threat to her young charges really a malign and ghostly presence, or something else entirely?
Book / Large Print / eBook / Audio eBook
Passing by Nella Larsen
Clare Kendry is married to a racist white man unaware of her African American heritage, and has severed all ties to her past after deciding to “pass” as a white woman. Clare’s childhood friend, Irene Redfield, just as light-skinned, has chosen to remain within the African American community, and is simultaneously allured and repelled by Clare’s risky decision. Clare’s interest in Irene turns into a homoerotic longing for Irene’s black identity that she abandoned and can never embrace again, and she is forced to grapple with her decision to pass for white in a way that is both tragic and telling.
Book / Large Print / eBook / Audio eBook
Chronicle of a Death Foretold by Gabriel García Márquez
A man returns to the town where a baffling murder took place 27 years earlier, determined to get to the bottom of the story. The more that is learned, the less is understood, and as the story races to its inexplicable conclusion, an entire society–not just a pair of murderers–is put on trial.
Dept. of Speculation by Jenny Offill
Dept. of Speculation is a portrait of a marriage. It is also a beguiling rumination on the mysteries of intimacy, trust, faith, knowledge, and the condition of universal shipwreck that unites us all.
We the Animals by Justin Torres
Life in this family is fierce and absorbing, full of chaos and heartbreak and the euphoria of belonging completely to one another. From the intense familial unity felt by a child to the profound alienation he endures as he begins to see the world, this beautiful novel reinvents the coming-of-age story in a way that is sly and punch-in-the-stomach powerful.
Book / eBook / Audio eBook
Pnin by Vladimir Nabokov
Professor Timofey Pnin is a haplessly disoriented Russian émigré precariously employed on an American college campus in the 1950s. Pnin struggles to maintain his dignity through a series of comic and sad misunder-standings, all the while falling victim both to subtle academic conspiracies and to the manipulations of a deliberately unreliable narrator.