Dear readers, Few things in life rival the experience of sinking into a really meaty book, something sprawling and immersive where you can lose yourself for days. But sometimes, you need a quick hit — a perfectly constructed literary gem that packs an emotional punch in just a handful of pages. If the long epic is the overflowing sushi boat of the bookshelf, then novellas are the omakase: exquisitely crafted, perfectly balanced morsels where every garnish counts. You try your best to savor them, but it’s hard to resist swallowing the whole thing in one explosively flavorful bite. The form distills a story to its essentials: Brevity brooks no excuse for sloppy plotting or milquetoast characters. Each turn of phrase — and, equally important, the silences between them — must be purposefully calibrated to take you where the author wants you to go, and there’s certainly no room for throat-clearing or baggy prose. Whether you’re kick-starting a year of reading, trying to get out of a slump or just looking to spend a few hours in the capable hands of a literary maestro, here are two short books that deliver. —Jennifer “Small Things Like These,” by Claire KeeganFiction, 2021
It is no hot take to say that Keegan’s concise tale of an Irishman who discovers the dark underbelly of his quaint town is a literary treasure (the many experts who voted on our 100 Best Books of the 21st Century agree!). But I cannot talk about great novellas without mentioning this one, which is one of the most stunning pieces of fiction — at any length — I’ve ever read. The book follows Bill Furlong, a coal seller, in the weeks leading up to Christmas 1985. He is a man of duty: to his customers, to his wife, to his five daughters, to the widow who helped raise him. But while making deliveries, he stumbles upon the village’s unspoken secret: At the local convent, young unwed mothers are being held in squalid conditions and used as forced labor. Once Bill has seen them, he can’t put the women out of his mind, and he finds himself struggling between loyalty to his community and a sense of moral responsibility — felt all the more keenly because his own mother was a teenager who could have ended up in these very straits if her employer hadn’t given her a softer place to land. (The book is fictional, but the Magdalene laundries — where generations of Irish girls and women were institutionalized, their children often lost to early death or forced adoption — are not. The last one did not close until 1996.) Keegan’s prose is unflinching and atmospheric, with the austere beauty of a monastery. From the first lines you can feel the December chill — that biting wind that makes people pull their scarves a little closer. And in Furlong, she has created an affecting protagonist: a girl dad with a foolish heart who somehow manages to keep hoping that things will turn out all right. Read if you like: “The Wonder,” by Emma Donoghue; “The Heart’s Invisible Furies,” by John Boyne; fisherman sweaters; Cillian Murphy’s whole vibe. “Exit Lane,” by Erika VeurinkFiction, 2025
If you’re looking for something more uplifting, this charmingly Midwestern twist on “When Harry Met Sally” will have you giggling and kicking your feet all the way through. Our main characters are Teddy, a golden retriever of a lawyer who dreams of buying a house in the Iowa town where he grew up and raising a pack of kids next door to his best friend, and Marin, a prickly bisexual with a high-powered finance job, a penchant for oversize Oxford shirts and a firm commitment to fleeing the Hawkeye State and never again being the sad girl whose hometown hero dad died tragically young. As in the movie, the pair meet when he agrees to drive her to New York City on the day of their college graduation. Unlike Harry and Sally, however, Teddy and Marin take things beyond the bounds of friendship right away, with a kiss at a dive bar on that fateful first trip that will haunt each of them for years to come. Veurink has considerably less real estate here than most romance novelists to introduce complex characters, set up a swoony meet cute, cleverly employ tropes (friends-to-lovers, the grand romantic gesture, oops-there’s-only-one-bed) and build to a breathtaking, satisfying finale. That she accomplishes it all, in spades, with crackling banter and thoughtful explorations of grief and trauma along the way, is testament to her considerable skill. I fell as head over heels for these two as they did for each other — and if, like me, you want to keep hanging out with them after the book ends, there’s an epilogue, a playlist and some appropriately color-blocked merch available on the publisher’s website. Read if you like: the cinematic oeuvre of Nora Ephron; road trip singalongs; Rainbow Rowell novels; grimy karaoke bars; “People We Meet on Vacation,” by Emily Henry. We hope you’ve enjoyed this newsletter, which is made possible through subscriber support. Subscribe to The New York Times. Friendly reminder: Check your local library for books! Many libraries allow you to reserve copies online. Like this email? Sign-up here or forward it to your friends. Have a suggestion or two on how we can improve it? Let us know at books@nytimes.com. Plunge further into books at The New York Times or our reading recommendations.
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