Short Books To Read in a Weekend

One morning, a man wakes up to find himself transformed. Overnight, Anders’s skin has turned dark, and the reflection in the mirror seems a stranger to him. At first, he shares his secret only with Oona, an old friend turned new lover. Soon, reports of similar events begin to surface. Across the land, people are awakening in new incarnations, uncertain how their neighbors, friends, and family will greet them. As the bond between Anders and Oona deepens, change takes on a different shading: a chance at a kind of rebirth–an opportunity to see ourselves, face to face, anew.

McGlue is Ottessa Moshfegh’s debut novella, and it sets up the sort of strangeness—and, at times, repulsiveness—we’ve come to expect in her later works. Set in 1851 Salem, Massachusetts, McGlue is in custody after allegedly and drunkenly killing his best friend. McGlue isn’t convinced of the crime, and his remorseless thoughts drive the engine of this slow-burning narrative.

In this lyrical meditation of grief, Han Kang’s unnamed narrator wanders around the snow-filled city of Warsaw while she muses on all things white, from the innocuous—a silent dog—to the profound and devastating—the rice cake–colored skin of the baby who died in the narrator’s mother’s arms long ago, an event inspired by Kang’s family history. Beautiful and impossible to pin down, it’s a remarkably absorbing read.

Khristen is a teenager who, her mother believes, was marked by greatness as a baby when she died for a moment and then came back to life. After Khristen’s failing boarding school for gifted teens closes its doors, and she finds that her mother has disappeared, she ranges across the dead landscape and washes up at a “resort” on the shores of a mysterious, putrid lake the elderly residents there call “Big Girl.” Rivetingly strange and beautiful, and delivered with Williams’s searing, deadpan wit, Harrow is their intertwined tale of paradise lost and of their reasons—against all reasonableness—to try and recover something of it.

This is the story of a woman in search of herself, in every sense. When we first meet Ruby, a Métis woman in her thirties, her life is spinning out of control. She’s angling to sleep with her counselor while also rekindling an old relationship she knows will only bring more heartache. But as we soon learn, Ruby’s story is far more complex than even she can imagine. Probably Ruby is a dazzling novel about a bold, unapologetic woman taking control of her life and story, and marks the debut of a major new voice in Indigenous fiction.

When thirty-four-year-old Ms. Shibata gets a new job to escape sexual harassment at her old one, she finds that as the only woman at her new workplace—a manufacturer of cardboard tubes—she is expected to do all the menial tasks. One day she announces that she can’t clear away her coworkers’ dirty cups—because she’s pregnant and the smell nauseates her. The only thing is … Ms. Shibata is not pregnant. Surreal and absurdist, and with a winning matter-of-factness, a light touch, and a refreshing sensitivity to mental health, Diary of a Void will keep you turning the pages to see just how far Ms. Shibata will carry her deception for the sake of women, and especially working mothers, everywhere.

Susan Minot’s first book chronicles the Vincents, a sprawling New England family of nine: a religious mother, an alcoholic father, and their seven “monkeys.” A minimalist novel-in-stories, each chapter lurches forward with new conflicts and deceptions, mining the tenderness and tragedy of a family so extensive they’re cocooned in their own universe, for better or worse.

Jenny Offill’s much-loved portrait of a marriage at its breaking point—as funny as it is heartbreaking—can be read in a single sitting, but don’t be surprised if you feel the need to immediately start again from the beginning. Invoking the code name they once used in love letters about their bright and unknown future, the wife addresses her husband and attempts to make sense of how they’ve gotten to now.

Julian Barnes wrote Levels of Life after the death of his wife, and the tripartite book consists of three sections: one history, one fiction, and one memoir. The final section, in which Barnes writes candidly about the emotions that have consumed him since his wife’s death, is so precise in expressing grief—a universal yet indefinable emotion—that it will leave you reeling.

In spare yet rich prose, Zinzi Clemmons reflects on race, family, and grief through the lens of Thandi, a young mixed-race woman coming of age in America, watching her mother die of cancer, and moving through life without the person she needs most. Thandi’s search for meaning and her reflections on her mother’s childhood in Johannesburg merge into a multigenerational tale of lost and remade identity.

An interpreter has come to The Hague to escape New York and work at the International Court. A woman of many languages and identities, she is looking for a place to finally call home. She confronts power, love, and violence, both in her personal intimacies and in her work at the Court. She is soon pushed to the precipice, where betrayal and heartbreak threaten to overwhelm her, forcing her to decide what she wants from her life.

Over the course of a single year, our nameless narrator heroically tries to keep her small brood of four chickens alive despite the seemingly endless challenges that caring for other creatures entails. From the forty-below nights of a brutal Minnesota winter to a sweltering summer that brings a surprise tornado, she battles predators, bad luck, and the uncertainty of a future that may not look anything like the one she always imagined. A stunning and brilliantly insightful meditation on life and longing, Brood rewards its readers with the richness of reflection and unrelenting hope.

Kazu is dead. Born in Fukushima in 1933, the same year as the Japanese Emperor, his life is tied by a series of coincidences to the Imperial family and has been shaped at every turn by modern Japanese history. But his life story is also marked by bad luck, and now, in death, he is unable to rest, doomed to haunt the park near Ueno Station in Tokyo. Through Kazu’s eyes, we see daily life in Tokyo buzz around him and learn the intimate details of his personal story, how loss and society’s inequalities and constrictions spiraled towards this ghostly fate, with moments of beauty and grace just out of reach.

Nel and Sula’s devotion is fierce enough to withstand bullies and the burden of a dreadful secret. It endures even after Nel has grown up to be a pillar of the black community and Sula has become a pariah. But their friendship ends in an unforgivable betrayal—or does it end? Terrifying, comic, ribald, and tragic, Sula is a work that overflows with life.

When a woman unexpectedly loses her lifelong best friend and mentor, she finds herself burdened with the unwanted dog he has left behind. Her own battle against grief is intensified by the mute suffering of the dog, a huge Great Dane traumatized by the inexplicable disappearance of its master, and by the threat of eviction: dogs are prohibited in her apartment building. While others worry that grief has made her a victim of magical thinking, the woman refuses to be separated from the dog except for brief periods of time. Elegiac and searching, The Friend is both a meditation on loss and a celebration of human-canine devotion.

Eve has an adoring girlfriend, an impulsive streak, and a secret fear that she’s wasting her brief youth with just one person. So one evening she posts some nudes online. This is how Eve meets Olivia and through Olivia the charismatic Nathan. Despite her better instincts, the three soon begin a relationship—one that disturbs Eve as much as it enthralls her.  In the way only great fiction can, Acts of Service takes between its teeth the contradictions written all over our ideas of sex and sexuality.