Short Books
Short books to help you achieve your reading goals!
July 5, 2024
The Three Of Us
Ore Agbaje-Williams
What if your two favorite people hated each other with a passion? The wife has it all. A big house in a nice neighborhood, a ride-or-die snarky best friend, Temi, with whom to laugh about facile men, and a devoted husband who loves her above all else–even his distate for Temi. On a seemingly normal day, Temi comes over to spend a lazy afternoon with the wife: drinking wine, eating snacks, and laughing caustically about the husband’s shortcomings. But when the husband comes home and a series of confessions are made, the wife’s two confidantes are suddenly forced to jockey for their positions, throwing everyone’s integrity into question–and their long-drawn-out territorial dance, carefully constructed over years, into utter chaos. Told in three taut, mesmerizing parts–the wife, the husband, the best friend–over the course of one day, The Three of Us is a subversely comical, wildly astute, and painfully compulsive triptych of domestic life that explores cultural truths, what it means to defy them, and the fine line between compromise and betrayal when it comes to ourselves and the people we’re meant to love.
Enter The Aardvark
Jessica Anthony
It’s early one morning on a hot day in August, and millennial congressman Alexander Paine Wilson (R), planning his first reelection campaign and in deep denial about his sexuality, receives a mysterious, over-sized FedEx delivery on his front stoop. Inside is a gigantic taxidermied aardvark. This outrageous, edge-of-your-seat novel hurtles between contemporary Washington, DC, where Wilson tries to get rid of the unsightly beast before it destroys his career, and Victorian England–where we meet Titus Downing, the taxidermist who stuffed the aardvark, and Richard Ostlet, the naturalist who hunted her. Our present world, we begin to see, has been shaped in profound and disturbing ways by the secret that binds these men.
This Too Shall Pass
Milena Busquets
Feeling aimless after the death of the mother who was central to her life, 40-year-old Blanca turns to sex, her friends and her family for comfort before leaving her Barcelona home and embarking on a journey with her loved ones in search of healing and purpose.
Three O’clock In The Morning
Gianrico Carofiglio
Antonio is a boy on the cusp of adulthood. His father, once a brilliant mathematician, hasn’t figured much in his life since the divorce from his mother. But then Antonio is diagnosed with epilepsy and a hope for a cure takes father and son to a doctor in Marseille, where French old world charm meets a modern city of bohemians. There they are advised to spend two days and two nights together without sleep in order to trigger – and resolve the medication for – his condition. In this beautiful, gritty, and charming foreign city, Antonio and his father walk the streets and strain for conversation – until the late nights and caffeine-imbued adventures lead them to a series of unexpected people (and trysts) that connect them together for the first time. As the two cover poetry, family, sex, math, death, and dreams, their story becomes a mesmerizing 48-hour microcosm of a lifetime relationship as they discover much about illusions and regret, about talent and redemption, and, most of all, about love. Elegant, warm, and tender, set against the vivid backdrop of 1980s Marseille and its beautiful calanques, Three O’Clock in the Morning casts a spell on its readers – an unforgettable story imbued with nostalgia and a revelatory exploration of time and fate.
A Prayer For The Crown-Shy
Becky Chambers
Tender and healing… I’m prescribing a preorder to anyone who has ever felt lost. Stunning, kind, necessary.” -Sarah Gailey on book 1: A Psalm for the Wild-Built A Prayer for the Crown-Shy is a story of kindness and love from one of the foremost practitioners of hopeful SF. After touring the rural areas of Panga, Sibling Dex (a Tea Monk of some renown) and Mosscap (a robot sent on a quest to determine what humanity really needs) turn their attention to the villages and cities of the little moon they call home. They hope to find the answers they seek, while making new friends, learning new concepts, and experiencing the entropic nature of the universe. Becky Chambers’s new series continues to ask: in a world where people have what they want, does having more even matter?
The Bishop’s Bedroom
Piero Chiara
A sultry, stylish psychological thriller set in northern Italy’s lake region where two men with a shared taste for idling and erotic adventure compete for female affections as part of their bid to evade the emotional aftermath of World War Two.
How To Order The Universe
Maria Jose Ferrada
A richly imaginative debut, detailing a girl and her father finding their way -and themselves – while they work as traveling hardware salesmen in Pinochet-era Chile, is a rare work of magic and originality. For seven-year-old M, the world is guided by a firm set of principles, based on her father D’s life as a traveling salesman. Enchanted by her father’s trade, M convinces him to take her along on his routes, selling hardware supplies amid the backdrop of Pinochet-era Chile. As she becomes part of a tight-knit community of fellow salesmen and grifters, M is regaled with parables and anecdotes that inform her “parallel education,” D’s excuse for letting her skip school without M’s mother’s knowledge. As father and daughter trek from town to town in their old Renault, M’s memories and thoughts become tied to a language of rural commerce, philosophy, the cosmos, hardware products, and ghosts. M, in her innocence, barely notices the rising tensions and precarious nature of their work, until she and her father connect with an enigmatic photographer, E, whose presence threatens to upend the whimsical life they’ve created.
The Grownup
Gillian Flynn
A canny young woman is struggling to survive by perpetrating various levels of mostly harmless fraud. On a rainy April morning, she is reading auras at Spiritual Palms when Susan Burke walks in. A keen observer of human behavior, our unnamed narrator immediately diagnoses beautiful, rich Susan as an unhappy woman eager to give her lovely life a drama injection. However, when the “psychic” visits the eerie Victorian home that has been the source of Susan’s terror and grief, she realizes she may not have to pretend to believe in ghosts anymore. Miles, Susan’s teenage stepson, doesn’t help matters with his disturbing manner and grisly imagination. The three are soon locked in a chilling battle to discover where the evil truly lurks and what, if anything, can be done to escape it.
The Cook
Maylis de Kerangal
The Cook is a coming-of-age journey centered on Mauro, a young self-taught cook. The story is told by an unnamed female narrator, Mauro’s friend and disciple who we also suspect might be in love with him. Set not only in Paris but in Berlin, Thailand, Burma, and other far-flung places over the course of fifteen years, the book is hyperrealistic–to the point of feeling, at times, like a documentary. It transcends this simplistic form, however, through the lyricism and intensely vivid evocative nature of Maylis de Kerangal’s prose, which conjures moods, sensations, and flavors, as well as the exhausting rigor and sometimes violent abuses of kitchen work. In The Cook , we follow Mauro as he finds his path in life: baking cakes as a child; cooking for his friends as a teenager; a series of studies, jobs, and travels; a failed love affair; a successful business; a virtual nervous breakdown; and–at the end–a rediscovery of his hunger for cooking, his appetite for life.
Passing
Nella Larsen
Irene Redfield is a Black woman living an affluent, comfortable life with her husband and children in the thriving neighborhood of Harlem in the 1920s. When she reconnects with her childhood friend Clare Kendry, who is similarly light-skinned, Irene discovers that Clare has been passing for a white woman after severing ties to her past–even hiding the truth from her racist husband. Clare finds herself drawn to Irene’s sense of ease and security with her Black identity and longs for the community (and, increasingly, the woman) she lost. Irene is both riveted and repulsed by Clare and her dangerous secret, as Clare begins to insert herself–and her deception–into every part of Irene’s stable existence. First published in 1929, Larsen’s brilliant examination of the various ways in which we all seek to “pass,” is as timely as ever.
The Sound Of Language
Amulya Malladi
In this luminous story of bravery, tradition, and the power of language, an Afghan woman and Danish widower form an unexpected alliance.Escaping the turmoil and heartbreak of war-torn Kabul, Raihana settles with distant relatives in the strange, cold, damp country of Denmark. Homesick and heartbroken, Raihana bravely attempts to start a new life, trying hard not to ponder the fate of her husband, who was taken prisoner by the Taliban and never heard from again.Soon after arriving, Raihana finds herself in a language school, struggling to learn Danish, which she thinks sounds like the buzzing of bees. To improve her speaking skills, Raihana apprentices herself to Gunnar, a recent widower who is steadily withdrawing from the world around him, even neglecting the bee colonies he worked so hard to cultivate with his late wife. Over the course of the bee season, Raihana and Gunnar forge an unlikely relationship, despite the disapproval of their friends and relatives….
That Night
Alice McDermott
On a warm suburban night, the sound of lawn sprinklers is drowned out by the rumble of hot rods. Suddenly a car careens onto a family’s neat front yard, teenage boys spill out brandishing chains and leather, and a young man cries out for the girl he loves. Tonight fathers will pick up snow shovels and rakes to defend their turf, and children will witness a battle fueled by fierce, true love. This is the night they will talk about and remember as the moment everything changed forever.
Rizzio
Denise Mina
On the evening of March 9th, 1566, David Rizzio, the private secretary of Mary, Queen of Scots, was brutally murdered. Dragged from the chamber of the heavily pregnant Mary, Rizzio was stabbed fifty six times by a party of assassins. This breathtakingly tense novella dramatises the events that led up to that night, telling the infamous story as it has never been told before. A dark tale of sex, secrets and lies, Rizzio looks at a shocking historical murder through a modern lens–and explores the lengths that men and women will go to in their search for love and power.
Brokeback Mountain
Annie Proulx
Ennis del Mar and Jack Twist, two ranch hands, come together when they’re working as sheepherder and camp tender one summer on a range above the tree line. At first, sharing an isolated tent, the attraction is casual, inevitable, but something deeper catches them that summer. Both men work hard, marry, and have kids because that’s what cowboys do. But over the course of many years and frequent separations this relationship becomes the most important thing in their lives, and they do anything they can to preserve it. The New Yorker won the National Magazine Award for Fiction for its publication of “Brokeback Mountain,” and the story was included in Prize Stories 1998: The O. Henry Awards. In gorgeous and haunting prose, Proulx limns the difficult, dangerous affair between two cowboys that survives everything but the world’s violent intolerance.
The Trouble With The Truth
Edna Robinson
It’s 1928 and nine-year-old Lucresse Briard is trying to make sense of life and the jumbled, often challenging family it’s handed her: a single art-dealer father who thinks nothing of moving from place to place; her brother, Ben, who succeeds in any situation and seems destined for stardom; and their houseman, Fred, who acts like an old woman. As Lucresse advances through childhood to adolescence, she goes from telling wild lies for attention to desperately seeking the truth of who she is as a sophistication-craving teenager in the 1930s.
Arch-Conspirator
Veronica Roth
From dystopian visionary and bestselling phenomenon Veronica Roth comes a razor-sharp reimagining of Antigone. In Arch-Conspirator, Roth reaches back to the root of legend and delivers a world of tomorrow both timeless and unexpected. “A gut punch of a story. Roth takes everything fragile about love, everything powerful about certain doom, and blooms with it. You’ll be holding your breath until the very last word.”-Olivie Blake, New York Times bestselling author of The Atlas Six Outside the last city on Earth, the planet is a wasteland. Without the Archive, where the genes of the dead are stored, humanity will end. Passing into the Archive should be cause for celebration, but Antigone’s parents were murdered, leaving her father’s throne vacant. As her militant uncle Kreon rises to claim it, all Antigone feels is rage. When he welcomes her and her siblings into his mansion, Antigone sees it for what it really is: a gilded cage, where she is a captive as well as a guest. But her uncle will soon learn that no cage is unbreakable. And neither is he.
People Like Them
Samira Sedira
Anna and Constant Guillot live with their two daughters in the peaceful, remote mountain village of Carmac, largely deaf to the upheavals of the outside world. Everyone in Carmac knows each other, and most of its residents look alike–until Bakary and Sylvia Langlois arrive with their three children. Wealthy and flashy, the family of five are outsiders in the small town, their impressive chalet and three expensive cars a stark contrast with the modesty of those of their neighbors. Despite their differences, the Langlois and the Guillots form an uneasy, ambiguous friendship. But when both families begin experiencing financial troubles, the underlying class and racial tensions of their relationship come to a breaking point, and the unthinkable happens. With piercing psychological insight and gripping storytelling, People Like Them asks: How could a seemingly “normal” person commit an atrocious crime? How could that person’s loved ones ever come to terms with it afterward? And how well can you really know your own spouse?
At The Villa Of Reduced Circumstances
Alexander McCall Smith
In At the Villa of Reduced Circumstances, Professor Dr. von Igelfeld gets caught up in a nasty case of academic intrigue while on sabbatical at Cambridge. When he returns to Regensburg he is confronted with the thrilling news that someone from a foreign embassy has actually checked his masterwork, Portuguese Irregular Verbs, out of the Institute’s Library. As a result, he gets caught up in intrigue of a different sort on a visit to Bogota, Colombia.
Holy Lands
Amanda Sthers
As comic as it is deeply moving, Holy Lands chronicles several months in the lives of an estranged family of colorful eccentrics. Harry Rosenmerck is an aging Jewish cardiologist who has left his thriving medical practice in New York–to raise pigs in Israel. His ex-wife, Monique, ruminates about their once happy marriage even as she quietly battles an aggressive illness. Their son, David, an earnest and successful playwright, has vowed to reconnect with his father since coming out. Annabelle, their daughter, finds herself unmoored in Paris in the aftermath of a breakup. Harry eschews technology, so his family, spread out around the world, must communicate with him via snail mail. Even as they grapple with challenges, their correspondence sparkles with levity. They snipe at each other, volleying quips across the Atlantic, the Mediterranean, and Europe, and find joy in unexpected sources.
The City Of Mist
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
Bestselling author Carlos Ruiz Zafon conceived of this collection of stories as an appreciation to the countless readers who joined him on the extraordinary journey that began with The Shadow of the Wind. Comprising eleven stories, The City of Mist offers the reader compelling characters, unique situations, and a gothic atmosphere reminiscent of his beloved Cemetery of Forgotten Books quartet. The stories are mysterious, imbued with a sense of menace, and told with the warmth, wit, and humor of Zafon’s inimitable voice. A boy decides to become a writer when he discovers that his creative gifts capture the attentions of an aloof young beauty who has stolen his heart. A labyrinth maker flees Constantinople to a plague-ridden Barcelona, with plans for building a library impervious to the destruction of time. A strange gentleman tempts Cervantes to write a book like no other, each page of which could prolong the life of the woman he loves. And a brilliant Catalan architect named Antoni Gaudi reluctantly agrees to cross the ocean to New York, a voyage that will determine the fate of an unfinished masterpiece.