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Short & Sweet
Novels with fewer than 200 pages |
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If you'd like personalized book recommendations, check out our Tailored Titles services for both fiction and nonfiction books. |
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Things Fall Apart
by Chinua Achebe
A classic novel about the confrontation of African tribal life with colonial rule tells the tragic story of a warrior whose manly, fearless exterior conceals bewilderment, fear, and anger at the breakdown of his society.
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A Psalm for the Wild-Built:
A Monk and Robot Book
by Becky Chambers
In A Psalm for the Wild-Built, Hugo Award-winner Becky Chambers's delightful new Monk & Robot series gives us hope for the future. It's been centuries since the robots of Panga gained self-awareness and laid down their tools; centuries since they wandered, en masse, into the wilderness, never to be seen again; centuries since they faded into myth and urban legend. One day, the life of a tea monk is upended by the arrival of a robot, there to honor the old promise of checking in. The robot cannot go back until the question of what do people need? is answered. But the answer to that question depends on who you ask, and how. They're going to need to ask it a lot. Becky Chambers's new series asks: in a world where people have what they want, does having more matter?--
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The Awakening
by Kate Chopin
Over one long, languid summer Edna Pontellier, fettered by marriage and motherhood, becomes acquainted with Robert Lebrun. As the days shorten and the temperature begins to drop Edna succumbs to Robert's devotion. But in the thrall of this ever-strengthening desire Edna begins to realise the true extent of her psychological, social and sexual confinement and its devastating consequences for her future.
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Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress
by Sijie Dai
At the height of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, two young boys are sent to the country for "reeducation" at a remote mountain village, where their lives take an unexpected turn when they meet the beautiful daughter of a local tailor and stumble upon a forbidden stash of Western classics in Chinese translations.
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The Hound of the Baskervilles
by Arthur Conan Doyle
Could the sudden death of Sir Charles Baskerville have been caused by the gigantic ghostly hound that is said to have haunted his family for generations? Arch-rationalist Sherlock Holmes characteristically dismisses the theory as nonsense. And immersed in another case, he sends Watson to Devon to protect the Baskerville heir and observe the suspects close at hand.
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The Girl Who Reads on the Métro
by Christine Féret-Fleury
Juliette leads a perfectly ordinary life in Paris, working a slow office job, dating a string of not-quite-right men, and fighting off melancholy. The only bright spots in her day are her métro rides across the city and the stories she dreams up about the strangers reading books across from her: the old lady, the math student, the amateur ornithologist, the woman in love, the girl who always tears up at page 247. One morning, avoiding the office for as long as she can, Juliette finds herself on a new block, in front of a rusty gate wedged open with a book. Unable to resist, Juliette walks through, into the bizarre and enchanting lives of Soliman and his young daughter, Zaide. Before she realizes entirely what is happening, Juliette agrees to become a passeur, Soliman's name for the booksellers he hires to take stacks of used books out of his store and into the world, using their imagination and intuition to match books with readers. Suddenly, Juliette's daydreaming becomes her reality, and when Soliman asks her to move in to their store to take care of Zaide while he goes away, she has to decide if she is ready to throw herself headfirst into this new life.
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The Guest Cat
by Takashi Hiraide
A couple in their 30s, living in a small rented cottage in a quiet part of Tokyo, no longer have much to say to each other until a cat invites itself into their home, bringing joy and promise, until something happens.
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The Summer Book
by Tove Jansson
Presents twenty-two vignettes which tell the story of Sophia, a six-year-old girl awakening to existence, and her grandmother, nearing the end of her life, as they spend the summer on a tiny island off the coast of Finland.
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Small Things Like These
by Claire Keegan
In a small Irish town in 1985, coal merchant and family man, Bill Furlong, while delivering an order to the local convent, makes a discovery that forces him to confront both his past and the complicit silences of a town controlled by the church.
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What Does It Feel Like?
by Sophie Kinsella
Eve is a successful novelist who wakes up one day in a hospital bed with no memory of how she got there. Her husband, never far from her side, explains that she has had an operation to remove the large, malignant tumor growing in her brain. As Eve learns to walk, talk, and write again-and as she wrestles with her diagnosis, and how and when to explain it to her beloved children-she begins to recall what's most important to her: long walks with her husband's hand clasped firmly around her own, family game nights, and always buying that dress when she sees it. Recounted in brief anecdotes, each one is an attempt to answer the type of impossible questions recognizable to anyone navigating the labyrinth of grief.
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Leaving the Atocha Station
by Ben Lerner
Adam Gordon is a brilliant, if highly unreliable, young American poet on a prestigious fellowship in Madrid, struggling to establish his sense of self and his relationship to art. What is actual when our experiences are mediated by language, technology, medication, and the arts? Is poetry an essential art form, or merely a screen for the reader's projections? Instead of following the dictates of his fellowship, Adam’s "research" becomes a meditation on the possibility of the genuine in the arts and beyond: are his relationships with the people he meets in Spain as fraudulent as he fears his poems are? A witness to the 2004 Madrid train bombings and their aftermath, does he participate in historic events or merely watch them pass him by?
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Every Heart a Doorway
by Seanan McGuire
Sent away to a home for children who have tumbled into fantastical other worlds and are looking for ways to return, Nancy triggers dark changes among her fellow schoolmates and resolves to expose the truth when a child dies under suspicious magical circumstances.
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Galatea
by Madeline Miller
An enchanting short story from Madeline Miller that boldly reimagines the myth of Galatea and Pygmalion, now in audio for the first time**Performed by Ruth Wilson and featuring an afterword by Madeline Miller**In ancient Greece, a skilled marble sculptor has been blessed by a goddess who has given his masterpiece--the most beautiful woman the town has ever seen--the gift of life. After marrying her, he expects Galatea to please him, to be obedience and humility personified. But she has desires of her own and yearns for independence.In a desperate bid by her obsessive husband to keep her under control, Galatea is locked away under the constant supervision of doctors and nurses. But with a daughter to rescue, she is determined to break free, whatever the cost . . . With a spellbinding performance by Ruth Wilson (His Dark Materials, The Affair), step back into Madeline Miller's mythic world.
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Convenience Store Woman
by Sayaka Murata
A Japanese woman who has been working at a convenience store for 18 years, much to the disappointment of her family, finds friendship with an alienated, cynical and bitter young man who becomes her coworker.
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Dept. of Speculation
by Jenny Offill
An unflinching portrait of marriage by the award-winning author of Last Things features a heroine simply referred to as "the Wife," who transitions from an idealistic woman who once exchanged love letters with her husband and who confronts an array of universal difficulties.
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Riot Baby
by Tochi Onyebuchi
A global dystopian narrative and an intimate family story with quietly devastating things to say about love, fury, and the black American experience. Ella and Kev are brother and sister, both gifted with extraordinary power. Their childhoods are defined and destroyed by structural racism and brutality. Their futures might alter the world. When Kev is incarcerated for the crime of being a young black man in America, Ella--through visits both mundane and supernatural--tries to show him the way to a revolution that could burn it all down--
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Even Though I Knew the End
by C. L. Polk
Offered one last job before serving an eternity in hell, a magical detective in Chicago is given three days to track down the White City Vampire and the chance to live out the rest of her life.
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Grief is the Thing with Feathers
by Max Porter
A recently widowed father of two has difficulty dealing with his grief and the overwhelming sadness of his children, until they are visited by Crow, an actual crow, who serves as an antagonist, protector, therapist and babysitter and helps them heal.
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Wide Sargasso Sea
by Jean Rhys
Beautiful and wealthy Antoinette Cosway's passionate love for an English aristocrat threatens to destroy her idyllic West Indian island existence and her very life.
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Franny and Zooey
by J. D. Salinger
The short story, Franny, takes place in an unnamed college town and tells the tale of an undergraduate who is becoming disenchanted with the selfishness and inauthenticity she perceives all around her. The novella, Zooey, is named for Zooey Glass, the second youngest member of the Glass family. As his younger sister, Franny suffers a spiritual and existential breakdown in her parents' Manhattan living room-leaving Bessie, her mother, deeply concerned-Zooey comes to her aid, offering what he thinks is brotherly love, understanding, and the words of sage advice.
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Frankenstein
by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
A monster assembled by a scientist from parts of dead bodies develops a mind of his own as he learns to loathe himself and hate his creator. Includes illustrated notes throughout the text explaining the historical background of the story.
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My Name is Lucy Barton
by Elizabeth Strout
After an appendix operation puts her in the hospital, New York writer Lucy Barton reconnects with her estranged mother as the pair reminisce about the past.
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All Systems Red
by Martha Wells
As a heartless killing machine, I was a complete failure. In a corporate-dominated spacefaring future, planetary missions must be approved and supplied by the Company. Exploratory teams are accompanied by Company-supplied security androids, for their own safety. But in a society where contracts are awarded to the lowest bidder, safety isn't a primary concern. On a distant planet, a team of scientists are conducting surface tests, shadowed by their Company-supplied 'droid--a self-aware SecUnit that has hacked its own governor module, and refers to itself (though never out loud) as Murderbot. Scornful of humans, all it really wants is to be left alone long enough to figure out who it is. But when a neighboring mission goes dark, it's up to the scientists and their Murderbot to get to the truth.
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Mrs. Dalloway
by Virginia Woolf
In the wake of World War I and the 1918 flu pandemic, Clarissa Dalloway, elegant and vivacious, is preparing for a party and remembering those she once loved. In another part of London, Septimus Smith is suffering from shell- shock and on the brink of madness. Their days interweave and their lives converge as the party reaches its glittering climax. In this engulfing portrait of one day in a woman's life, in which she perfects the interior monologue and recapitulates the life cycle in the hours of the day, from first light to the dark of night, Woolf achieves an uncanny simulacrum of consciousness, bringing past, present, and future together, and recording, impression by impression, minute by minute, the feel of life itself.
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Avon Lake Public Library
32649 Electric Blvd.
Avon Lake, Ohio 44012
440-933-8128alpl.org |
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