Short books for busy weeks

When there is no time for a long novel, these are the ones I reach for.

April was a month of long working days and tired evenings, the kind where a six-hundred-page novel feels less like a pleasure and more like a debt. So I went looking for short books, and found that some of my favourites live under two hundred pages.

• A Month in the Country by J. L. Carr — a summer, a church mural, and a man slowly coming back to life. Perfect in every way that matters.
• The Death of Ivan Ilyich — Tolstoy at his most concentrated. Not cheerful, but it reorganises your priorities for at least a week.
• Train Dreams by Denis Johnson — a whole American century in one quiet life.
• Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan — read it in a single evening and thought about it for a month.
• Bartleby, the Scrivener — my reward for finishing Moby-Dick. Funnier and stranger than I remembered.

The thing short books teach you is that length is not the same as depth. A good novella is not a novel with the boring parts removed. It is a different shape altogether, built to be held in the mind all at once, the way you might hold a single photograph rather than an album.

If you have a favourite short book, I would genuinely like to hear about it. My list for next April is already looking thin.