5 Short Books to Read in a Day—Award Season Edition 2024

NPR was floored by this “knockout” debut novel that follows eight teenage girls in Reno, Nevada as they compete in a national boxing competition. “In her short, hard-punching novel, Rita Bullwinkel manages to capture the girls and scenes and phrases from childhood into the ring, then out into that bigger ring called life."

Set in modern-day Seoul, this 2016 International Booker Prize-winning novella follows Yeong-hye, a home-maker whose life takes a dramatic turn after a series of vivid nightmares move her to renounce meat. As her vegetarianism escalates into a complete refusal to consume any animal product, her decision triggers intense familial and societal conflict, revealing a deep-seated darkness within those around her.

“Anthony has served an ace," with this tale of a disaffected 1950s housewife who refuses to leave her apartment complex pool. “This superb short novel, about a marriage at its breakpoint, deserves to become a classic,” raved NPR.

This acclaimed Irish author’s “gripping” sophomore novel landed on multiple best of 2024 lists, including Vogue’s. “With her careful and caring novel, Nolan shows how misfortune can start with a few bad decisions and how culpability is entangled in providence and privilege. Her prose is slicing and exacting; this is a book that smarts but also comforts with its precise generosity."

Join six men and women from America, Russia, Italy, Britain and Japan orbiting Earth at over seventeen thousand miles per hour in this slender, mesmerizing novel that “satisfies both my lifelong obsession with space travel and my hunger for sentences and paragraphs that demand to be read and reread. A day in the life of six astronauts aboard the International Space Station, that’s all, but my goodness this novel is beautiful,” raved novelist Mark Haddon in the New Statesman.