Inside every novelist is a novella writer trying to get out. At least, that’s the theory I’ve developed after years of conversations with authors of big fat 500-pagers in which they confess they didn’t mean to produce so many words — they really wanted to write with the miraculous economy of Claire Keegan or Denis Johnson.
Last year, when I interviewed Alan Hollinghurst, contemporary king of the English doorstopper, he told me he wished he could produce short books: “I tried desperately to be Penelope Fitzgerald and get everything into 180 pages but you just can’t do it.” Another Booker prizewinner, the Jamaican writer Marlon James, says he envies writers who can produce a great short novel. “I hate people who can pull off short novels. When I do a detail, it’s 70 pages,” he said on a podcast, describing his most famous book, A Brief History of Seven Killings (704 pages) as “a series of failed short novels”.
Lately, I’ve been recalling these confessions as I watch short fiction stealthily seize the book world. Skinny is back, in the book world at least — Samantha Harvey’s Booker-winning mini-masterpiece Orbital (144 pages) being the lead example. Among the most talked-about novels of this year is Perfection, a short satire of millennial living by a virtually unknown Italian writer, Vincenzo Latronico (120 pages).
Walk into most bookshops and you’ll be greeted by prominent displays of novellas (about 100 pages) and short novels (anything south of 250 pages). They might include the works of the Italian writer Natalia Ginzburg, whose short, sharp fiction is belatedly making it into English, Tessa Hadley’s The Party (128 pages), Jon Fosse’s Morning and Evening (104 pages) or the works of his fellow Nobel prizewinners Annie Ernaux and Han Kang, both of whom tend to write short books. Then there are the voguish re-releases, like Jacqueline Harpman’s I Who Have Never Known Men, a punchy dystopian story of a caged woman from 1995 that has suddenly become popular among Gen Zers on TikTok (208 pages).
And there’s this year’s longlist for the International Booker prize, which is dominated by short novels. Of the 13 books chosen, 12 come in under 300 pages and eight have fewer than 200. But it’s not just translated fiction. Many of the review copies of this year’s hyped British fiction releases, from Natasha Brown’s Universality (176 pages) to Anthony Shapland’s debut, A Room Above a Shop (160 pages), can now fit through my small letterbox.
So why has short fiction become so hot? Is this another sign of austerity — a reaction to the rocketing price of paper? Perhaps it’s the literary equivalent of a small plates revolution with £10.99 novellas? Or are publishers responding to shrinking attention spans?
What’s changed is that we now have a more varied publishing ecosystem, says Karolina Sutton, a literary agent whose clients include Margaret Atwood, Haruki Murakami and Yael van der Wouden, whose short debut, The Safekeep, was Booker-shortlisted last year. “There is space and support for books of almost any length right now,” she says. “There is something appealing about distilling ethical and moral dilemmas into something sparser, with more economy. It’s a real skill.”
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Sutton believes “time pressure” on readers is likely to be driving interest. But there are other factors, including a change of attitude among retailers. “Some of the chains in the past insisted on the books being a certain length — say, 300 pages – for pricing reasons. The margins make more sense when you charge for a book at a particular price. We certainly didn’t see any novellas on the tables at the front of shops — they weren’t promoted.”
She credits the arrival of James Daunt as managing director of Waterstones in 2011 with helping to open out the field (Daunt is now experiencing similar success transforming Barnes & Noble in the US). “He was much more open-minded about a variety of formats. It’s been joyous to see there is no judgment between a book of 100 pages and 300 pages.”
Another development is the huge growth in independent retailers. Tom Robinson, who runs my local indie — Gloucester Road Books in Bristol — is a great champion of short fiction. He introduced me to Kick the Latch, Kathryn Scanlan’s experimental novel about American horse trainers (137 pages), as well as Yuri Herrera’s Season of the Swamp, a short speculative history about Mexico’s first indigenous president, exiled to New Orleans (160 pages).
“Short novels are great vehicles for strong ideas that can burn brightly and briefly,” Robinson says. “Not everything needs to be sustained through long narrative arcs and character development. Sometimes it’s exciting to read a book that doesn’t want to be sustained.”
Robinson stocks lots of books by publishers such as Fitzcarraldo, And Other Stories, Charco and Peirene — he says there is a strong correlation between small independent presses and shorter fiction, much of which is translated.
“If you look at the indie press shelves in our shop there are loads of thinner spines, and this isn’t a coincidence,” he says. “Shorter books are more likely to be risk-taking or challenging, so there’s more likelihood that they’ll come from a press happy to take risks and challenge.”
The growing popularity of translated fiction is another reason for the great shrinking — and here, economics come into play. Translators charge by the word, meaning that short books are quite simply cheaper to publish — and authors unknown to British readers are cheaper to buy in.
Gaby Wood, the chief executive of the Booker Prize Foundation, has seen various changes in attitude in the ten years she’s presided over two of the world’s most prestigious annual fiction prizes. She oversaw a significant tweak in the Booker prize submission rules that removed the word “novel”, which came about after David Szalay was shortlisted in 2016 for All That Man Is. This was a book that to some readers looked suspiciously like a collection of short stories. But Wood argued “sustained and unified” — which had always been in the rules — should be the main criterion for eligibility.
“Sometimes works are hybrid,” she argues. “You don’t want the judges sitting around saying, ‘Is this a novel?’ because that’s the most boring question anyone can ask about an interesting piece of work.”
Wood points out that it’s really only in the Anglosphere that the novel is considered the pinnacle of literary forms — the International Booker has “always admitted short story collections on the grounds that in some countries that is the presiding form”. She cites Argentina, where the traditions of Jorge Luis Borges and Julio Cortázar have been followed by Mariana Enriquez and Samanta Schweblin.
What’s clear is that readers don’t feel cheated by short books. A work of 100 pages, in which a writer has distilled decades of thought, experience and intellectual pursuit, can be every bit as nourishing as a 350-pager. Plus you might get an added sense of achievement from completing it in an afternoon. Wood agrees: “It doesn’t matter how long a book is in pages. It’s about the space it takes up in the mind.”
Five of the best short novels
Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico trans by Sophie Hughes (120 pages)
Vincenzo Latronico’s ingenious satire on Insta-friendly millennial living has become one of the buzziest books of 2025. Anna and Tom are members of the 21st-century creative class living in a fashionable Berlin neighbourhood in the early 2010s. We learn about them through the images they present and the items they own — a Japanese teapot, a Berber rug, a limited-edition vinyl of Radiohead’s In Rainbows and houseplants. So many houseplants. A horribly compelling tale of commodity fetishism that’s been longlisted for the International Booker.
Hunchback by Saou Ichikawa trans Polly Barton (112 pages)
When this unique, eye-opening debut won Japan’s Akutagawa prize in 2023, Saou Ichikawa became the first disabled writer to win the prestigious literary award. It’s told from the perspective of a disabled woman, Shaka, who lives in a care home near Tokyo but has a secret online life writing pornographic stories for money. Then one day, a new male care worker reveals that he has been following her online. A stark, subversive novel that is also on the longlist for this year’s International Booker.
Shams by Meike Ziervogel (112 pages)
The German novelist and founder of the independent press Peirene (which publishes many short books) never seems to stop. Her sixth novel (they’re all short) is based on her experience of setting up schools for refugees in Lebanon and Syria. A young Syrian woman, Shams, lives in Shatila, one of the world’s oldest refugee camps, where, against the wishes of her family, she longs to be educated. An unsettling, atmospheric exploration of life in a camp, which becomes a character in its own right.
A Room Above a Shop by Anthony Shapland (160 pages)
The Welsh writer’s debut novel is centred on two quiet men, B and M, who begin working and living together in M’s hardware store, leading to a passionate relationship neither expected. Set in a valley in south Wales in the late 1980s, it is a tender romance of careful concealment that plays out against a backdrop of Section 28 and the Aids crisis, as well as the aftermath of the miners’ strike. Written in short, lyrical, mosaic-like paragraphs, this is a beautifully crafted love story that lingers long in the memory.
The Children’s Bach by Helen Garner (176 pages)
This recently republished 1984 novella by the Australian writer is a spare, subtle, droll book about the shifting relationships of a group of family and friends. In suburban Melbourne a loving couple, Athena and Dexter, face a crisis when Elizabeth, an old university friend of Dexter’s, re-enters their lives along with Philip, her rock musician boyfriend, and her younger sister, Vicki. Garner is not afraid of writing sentences that take time to puzzle out — and then really stay with you. As Philip advises an aspiring songwriter: “Take out the clichés … Don’t explain everything. Leave holes.”
Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico (Fitzcarraldo £12.99). To order a copy go to timesbookshop.co.uk. Free UK standard P&P on orders over £25. Special discount available for Times+ members.
Hunchback by Saou Ichikawa (Viking £10.99). To order a copy go to timesbookshop.co.uk. Free UK standard P&P on orders over £25. Special discount available for Times+ members.
