Quick reads you can finish in 10-30 minutes
Found 1964 short novels
I wake to a wet, warm tongue on my face, and the first sound I make is a soft, helpless sound. Then I open my eyes. "Hey—stop that!" I say, but it comes out small. A pair of blue eyes blink at me. A huge muzzle pulls back and shows sharp white teeth. I freeze. The animal is huge. White fur like snow. Ears straight up. Claws like small knives. This is not a dog. "Who—who are you?" I whisper, though I am not sure who I mean. The wolf sniffs me again. It makes a low sound that I think...
I break the water and cough my first ragged breath. "Where am I?" I say. A cold boat of panic pushes through my chest. I wipe river water off my face and stare at my hands. They are smooth, not scarred like the hands that dug traps and handled venom in the valley where I grew up. Memories slam in like a stampede. I died. Then I woke up inside someone named An Mengqing. She is the rich daughter of a top family in the capital. She married a man named Landon Bruno — the city’s coldest...
I was eleven when the first trumpet sounded for my family and the first name was carved into the earth. “My daughter,” my mother whispered then, pressing my cheek with a palm that smelled of tea and smoke. “Keep your hands clean. Keep your head clear. We serve because we must.” “I will,” I said, because children promise what they cannot imagine breaking. Years later, I learned how much a promise can be taxed, and how thin a palace’s mercy can be. “You must come in, Hera,” Lucy said...
"Please, please, save my father," I begged, my forehead pressed to the ICU glass. I could see his hand twitch under the blankets. Machines were loud and red. I felt small and empty. "Blakely," Xander Black said behind me, his voice flat as steel. "Look at him." He shoved my head so hard my lips left a smear on the glass. "He used my mother," Xander spat at the old man on the bed. "He lied. He let her drown and blamed her. You think I won't make them pay?" My father tried to...
I am Elaina Sherman. "I saw them," I told myself like an accusation. "I saw them together." They were the two people who had built the map of my life—Atlas Green and I used to joke that maps led to treasure; Annabelle Chang and Carter Malik were part of my coastline, my safe harbor. Now that coastline had been cut by a jagged reef. "I can't believe she would do this," I said out loud to the empty room, because speaking softened the ache a little. "You have to decide," Atlas told me...
I did not expect my secret to be something that could eat me. For seven years he had been my guardian, my quiet world. For seven years I had called him "uncle" and kept a small, fierce crush folded tight like a secret coin in my pocket. For seven years I woke to the same face in the morning: Evren Ilyin—impossibly composed, impossibly distant, impossibly beautiful. I told myself I loved his steadiness. I told myself his coolness was safety. Then I discovered he was not exactly...
“Don’t come any closer.” I said it before I could think. My voice shook anyway. Ewan stopped three steps away and stared at me like I had said something rude to the sun. “Relax,” he said. “It’s just a curtain.” “Not funny.” I tugged the towel tighter around me. He sighed, as if the world owed him patience. “You dry yet?” “I’m always dry,” I snapped, but I sat down on the edge of his bed anyway. I wanted to be where I could see him. I wanted him to know I could see him. His...
I did not cry when he called me a liar in front of everyone. I did not run into the night screaming. I walked out of the police room with my chin held high and my hand around Mallory's arm like a steadying rope. "Indiana," Mallory said, voice thin with worry, "do you want me to call a lawyer?" "No," I said. "I want to go see the sea." The court clerk had been rattling the details of the complaint; the officer had explained the altercation; the recordings were already a mess on some...
I have loved a shadow three times over and once I loved a man who wore a chain for a living. "He looks ridiculous in red," I said the first time I curled into the funeral smoke and watched a man's life be boiled into soup. "Ridiculous?" The voice was all frost, and when the frost laughed, it sounded like metal. "He's dead. You should be disappointed." "I am a pig," I answered, because the last life had been a literal pig and I remembered the taste of blood being stewed with fermented...
“Stop! You'll kill him!” a thin, frightened voice cried. I opened my eyes to the taste of iron and a world that bled around the edges. My body folded under a pain I knew too well. My head said one thing and my bones another. “Gunner— I mean— answer me! Are you awake?” Alana Chaney's hands shook as she gripped my shoulder. “Alana,” I said, and the name felt strange and safe on my tongue. “Pack quickly. We go to the capital tonight.” She blinked, wet eyes bright in the half-light....
I still remember the way his room smelled like cheap cologne and old pizza when I found them. It was supposed to be a surprise—his birthday present wrapped in tissue, my hands shaking because I wanted it to feel right—but the surprise landed me in the doorway of a scene that told me everything I needed to know. "Who is she?" I said. "She's just a friend," Jackson Hassan said without looking up. "Just a friend who takes off her shirt in your bed?" I said. "Let's not make a scene,"...
I woke up choking on a dream and a century of ash. "You're trembling," said the dark room, which was really just a memory in my lungs. "Breathe, Ines." "No," I said. "Not that name." I sat up so fast the room swam. For a long, dizzy second, I thought the hundred years were real, every bruise and fevered memory. Then the candle on my small table steadied, and the silence around me took on the shape of a life I had not yet lived. "Who is at the gate?" someone outside called. I...
They brought me back because a little corpse had left a throne empty. They thought I would be grateful. They thought I would fit neatly into the role they had carved out. "I am Cataleya Allen," I said the first time I had to answer to a title that had once meant nothing to me. "Not a title," my nurse Janessa Barrett whispered in my ear as I rode into the capital, "a sentence." I laugh now when I remember that—how small the laugh was, how unreliable. The carriage was full of people who...
I am Gustav Duncan. I became a policeman because of her. "I want to know everything again," I said the afternoon Dixie Boehm brought me a cigarette and a photocopy of the painting. "Everything?" Dixie laughed and then pinched the cigarette out of my hand like she was taking a stubborn idea away. "You know I paint what I see. I don't tidy up truth." "I know," I said. "But the truth is a dangerous thing to leave alone." Dixie Boehm's painting was called Red Dress. It had made people...
I remember the palace laughter as if it were another country's weather — warm crowds, rising banners, and a kind of light that never reached the room where I sat. My name is Delaney Vogt, but everyone in the palace used "Empress" when they needed a shape for my duty and a sound for their resentment. When my throne was taken, the title stuck like a bruise. People still bowed; the names changed where worship had to be shown. "Delaney," Lily whispered, pulling a thin cloak around my shoulders....
"I think we should talk tonight," I said, lighting a candle. "It’s Friday," Brooks said, smiling like he always did on our ritual nights. "Our deep talk night." "I know." I poured the wine. "Just—let's be honest, okay?" He laughed and kissed my temple. "Always honest." Then I saw it: a fresh red spot on the back of his shoulder, right by the spine. It looked like someone had popped it earlier that day. "Who did that?" I asked instead of asking anything subtle. "I—" He didn't...
I remember the cold metal of the doorknob under my palm and the small, unreasonable hope that tonight—this night—would be the last night I had to beg the world for mercy. I breathed in and opened the door. He stood by the window with his back to me. The city lights cut across his shoulders. Even burned into memory, even in nightmares, I would know that shape. "Aiden?" I tried to make it a question. My voice came out thin. He turned. For a second the room reformed itself around...
"Mountain rain, fox wedding, stay away," my grandmother used to mutter when the wind took a strange shape through the pines. "She told you that?" I said, and I always said it with the same lazy smile because I did not believe in warnings people dressed up as stories. I was born in a cold season under a thin moon, so they said. I was small and sharp as a crow's feather, and for a long time I kept the mountain air inside me like a secret. "My name is Sofia Jordan," I told myself aloud on...
I woke up drenched in a memory I had lived again and again. "I dreamed it again," I told no one in particular as I sat on the worn couch. "He loved her in the dream. He took everything." "My lady, the rent—" Joann Carlson, my assistant, hissed into the phone with the landlord. "They say if we don't pay today—" "Okay," I said, and I put on sunglasses. "Then go pay it. I'll be fine." Joann's voice trembled. "You can't just—" "I know what I am," I said. "I'm Genesis Campbell. I know...
"I tasted it and I laughed out loud," I said, lifting the wooden ladle for Ezekiel to try. "You like it?" Ezekiel Campos blinked at me over the steam. "You made this?" "Me and the whole mess at home," I said. "Try it. Tell me if I priced it too high." Ezekiel put the spoon to his lips. He chewed once, then twice. He set the spoon down, eyes bright. "This is... honest," he said. "People will pay for honest. How many jars do you have?" "We've got two full jars today and a half a...
