Quick reads you can finish in 10-30 minutes
Found 1964 short novels
I spent eighteen years inside the stone-cool arms of a monastery. When I walked back into the capital as a princess, the world split along the seam of my return. Some people reached for me like a sun-starved thing, others shrank as if my shadow might bite. My mother, the Empress, apologized at court and promised me one thing in front of everyone: one wish would be granted. I looked until I could no longer keep the smile off my face, pointed through the crowd, and said, "Make Eliot Marino my...
I wake to a scrap of paper floating onto my chest. "What is this—" I whisper, fingers fumbling the folded leaf, then blink. The handwriting is flourished, elegant, sharp: the divorce note that killed her. My head explodes with pain and then with other people's memories. I clamp my eyes shut and breathe in a world that smells of bamboo and boiling rice. The past—my past, the life I left—slams into me, and the new life in this body fits like a borrowed shawl. "My name is Elaina Coulter,"...
I was seven the first time I almost died. "Stay with me," I croaked. "Ariya." She looked older than seven then, quiet as rain. "The spring has come," she said, and pushed a wet branch of spring begonia into my hands. "Where did you get this?" I whispered. My voice was small. The fever had hollowed me out. She smiled the way she always smiled—soft, steady. "I found it in a yard. I thought it would make you better." "I—" I tried to say thank you, but the words were stones in my...
"I saw your photo on the campus forum." "Who said that?" I said, dropping my bag on the bed. Joan, Lena and Nina crowded around like jurors. "You!" Joan opened my phone and shoved it toward me. "You didn't know?" I stared at the blurred library photo. It was me and a boy, close together, heads bent over a book. The caption screamed we were dating. My heart thudded dumbly. "That's not even his face," I said. "I don't know him." Lena waved a finger. "He’s Alexander Cunningham....
I woke to a smell like wet clay and old oil, and a hand like a burl of tree bark groping my cheek. "She's got good skin," a woman's voice rumbled at the foot of the bed. "Pretty face. Shame about the frame—no shape to her at all. Nobody'll pay for a lump like that." "Don't talk like that!" a second voice hissed, wheedling. "Look at her, Gregory—white as milk. If you ask me, she'll fetch more. Five taels is kind." "Five taels," muttered a third, younger voice. "I'll give five and a half...
1. The countdown read: seven days. "I dreamed about the dead again," I told the camera as I turned the light off. "It felt so real." I, Layne Cotton, had been a streamer since college. Night shifts, late naps. That evening I woke to a flash of memory like a warned alarm. I couldn't tell if it had been a dream or a premonition, but one detail stuck: a scandal about a celebrity, then a news spike, then a tag I did not expect — "rebirth" and "seven days." "Fans are going wild," I said to...
“I’m leaving,” I said, and I closed the little door behind me. People think that was the end of my story. They think I walked out and vanished. They were almost right. I walked away, but I did not vanish. “You can’t just leave like this, Gracie,” my father, Hugh Benjamin, said when I told him I needed space. “I need space to plan,” I said. “Trust me for one thing, Dad. Let me handle this.” “Handle what?” he asked. “How he used me,” I said. “He never loved you,” Jacob Copeland,...
I remember the coffee spilling first. "Fill this out," Professor Ulrich Frank had said, and his voice sounded like a bell I could not stop hearing. I saw Laurel Li bent over the paper, hair tucked behind her ear, the way she always concentrated before a test. She was so quiet, so careful. It made me feel sharp, like a knife. "Alonso, don't loiter," Ulrich added without looking at me. The office smelled of old books and coffee. I moved closer. The camera in the corner had a red light. I...
“He’s trying to kill me.” “He what?” Fox said, but his face had already told me everything. I wasn’t dead. I was sitting on his office floor with fingers clawing at a throat that was not mine and a hand—big, white-knuckled—still around my neck. “Elliot,” Fox said, rushing to pry the hand away. “Let go of her!” Elliot Bush let go. He stepped back as if my skin burned him. “You lied,” he said, voice low, dangerous. “You used poison. You pretended to be Hannah Winter.” My lungs...
I was sold into the mountains two years ago. My name is Denver Boone. I still say it to myself at night to keep my feet from sinking into whatever bed of shame I sleep on. "Denver, step out. Come on," Kingston Davidson would bark, and I would obey because obedience kept me alive for a day, for an hour. He kept me on a chain like a dog. "You belong here," Hedda Medina told me, morning after morning, her voice slick with faith. I learned to nod. I learned to measure pain. "I can help you,"...
I never expected a moonlit cave to hand me the whole world. "I hear a baby," I said, bending closer to the dark, my voice small in the hollow. "You hearing things now, Miriam?" Dieter answered, rubbing his temple. "We've had no sleep for days." "I did," I insisted. "Listen." I moved forward. The sound came again, thin and tired. The earth smelled of smoke and travel, our cart's last grain of flour gone weeks ago, our shoes all split. I reached with both hands into the dark corner and...
I walked into the Ward mansion in a red dress. "Stay close and do exactly what I tell you," the housekeeper said, her voice steady but her hands shaking a little. "I understand," I said. I kept my head down and walked into the room. He was beautiful even asleep. Sharp cheekbones, thick black lashes, a straight nose. I should have only been a body in a story the family told the old man to get over his grief. I should have only been an actor hired to be a bride for a night. "You're...
"I opened my eyes and spat blood," I said, and the room answered with old wood creaking. "I told you not to come to town today," my mother whispered, half asleep on the kang. "You are weak." "I will go," I said. "I will bring them back." They had tied me to a bed once. They had left me for dead on a stone floor. They had slit the cart wheel under my feet and pushed the horse. I died with the taste of blood and the name of the woman who ruined my family on my lips. Now I was back. I...
I remember the winter like a wound that never healed. "The mountain trembled," I told them. "The sky opened its fist. Let it be a good year." "It is a sign," the ministers said. "A blessing for the realm." "I only asked one thing," I said to no one. "Only that she be well." "She will be well, Your Majesty," Constance said beside me, folding the child's small robe with trembling hands. "She will," I lied, because I had to keep some order in a palace that still needed an emperor's...
I wake in a pool of light. The room smells like flowers that were meant for a funeral. A bright red sheet is spread under me like a stage. Chains bite my wrists and ankles. People count money in voices that smell like rust. “Tonight’s third lot—Night Lithe,” the auctioneer says, as though this is an ordinary evening. I remember darkness. I remember how a blind world swallowed me last time. I remember the last beat of my real life, when truth reached through whatever light I had and tore...
I remember the first time someone called me “the ruin” like it was a curtain being drawn across the sun. They pointed at my green robes, at the way my hair fell like ink, at the strange quiet that followed me when I walked. They did not know my name then. They only shouted a word that fit the fear in their throats. “My name,” I told a god once, “is Lainey Romano.” He blinked as if surprised. “That is a pretty name,” he said, and I thought for a moment he might be different from the...
I woke with a small, warm hand testing my forehead. "Her fever has broken," Anders Knight said softly, pleased. I tried to move and a thousand memories flooded me — some from a life I had just lived, some from this life I had woken into. My name here was Brittany Larson, a merchant's youngest daughter; in another life I had called a different man husband, and I had loved him. "You're awake," my mother, Aurelie Mortensen, whispered. Her voice wrapped around me like a shawl. "You frightened...
I never expected my life to split into "before" and "after" like someone flipping a cheap switch. "You're sure you want this?" my mother asked, voice small. "Yes," I said. "Do it." She squeezed my hand like she was squeezing a child's, and I let her. Booker Martin put his face in his hands and looked older in that moment than he was in every photograph on the mantle. "Your teacher called," Alayna Berry said later, smiling the tired, professional smile teachers wear when they are...
"I'll say hello and smile," I told myself as Beckett steered me toward the cluster of men with too much drink and too much money. "Annika, meet Mr. Deacon," Beckett said, and the man with the big belly reached for my hand like it belonged to a prize. "Nice to meet you," I said, and smiled slow. "You're even prettier than the papers said," Deacon Singh slurred, and his hand found my hip. "Back off," I said, cold as a glass. Beckett laughed nervously and lifted his drink. I moved...
I died in year five of the collapse. I thought it would be the end. Then I woke up three months before the storm began again. "I opened my eyes and I was back," I said out loud in the empty kitchen. "This time, nothing gets to me by surprise." My name is Fatima Leroy. The jade pendant at my throat had been my grandmother's. In my last life, a streak of my own blood revealed a space inside it—small at first, but safe. I remembered how it had saved me. I remembered the rules of that space,...
