Quick reads you can finish in 10-30 minutes
Found 1964 short novels
I never thought a summer trip to my mother's house would end with police tape around my bedroom and my life falling into pieces. "I told you to rest, Mom," I said as I hugged my younger daughter and smoothed her hair in the passenger seat. "We’ll stay for a week, just to be safe." "You always worry too much," my mother replied, smiling in the rearview mirror. "Let the girls run. I’ll keep them." We took the country road out of the city, the girls chittering about the playground back...
I've had a crush on my desk mate for three years. "I've written books with him as the hero," I say, folding my hands around a warm drink. "Every main character looks exactly like Romeo." Danna Lopez laughs and nudges me. "Only you would write fan fiction with a classmate as the lead." She never speaks that in public, but tonight she does. Romeo Evans sits across the table, sleeves rolled, looking clean and calm like always. He is the kind of person whose face makes other faces go home...
Part One — The Voice, the Boss, the Trash Can Plan "I can't believe you were lip-kissing your hand in the office," I blurted, trying to laugh it off. Gage Smirnov stood in the doorway like a storm. He didn't usually stand in doorways. He stood in the center of rooms and made the air colder. His face was poker-still, but his eyes were not. "Spring makes people nostalgic?" he said. "I—" I pressed my palm to my damp cheek and felt ridiculous. "Minister, I was sleepwalking. You believe me,...
"I can't believe you came back." "Why wouldn't I?" I said. "Someone has to decide what my mother's company will be called." Gunther Boyer stopped with my suitcase between his hands. He bent as if to pick it up, then let his arm hang. The airport sun made his face hard to read. He was still the same height, still folded into that composed posture, but his suit had changed the way the world leaned when he stood in it. "I didn't know," he said after a long pause. "Lee told me—" "Lee...
I first saw him at the White Horse Club, a dim room of chandeliers and soft music where people paid for company and pretended boredom like it was art. "I want a full table," I told the manager, folding my hands over the napkin like a woman who had practiced being in charge. "Ms. Allison," Gregory Taylor said with a thin smile and a glass that had already been drained, "you're late as always." "Business runs on my time," I said. "And my table stays reserved." He laughed and offered...
I am Meredith Barrett, and I learned early that to survive in a great house you had to be very small, very quiet, and very useful. "I wrapped the washing bowl tight," I told her once, when she ordered me around. "And I swept the courtyard twice, Madam Bianca." "Good," Bianca said, and the word was like a bright coin dropped into my palm. "You are obedient, Meredith. Like a little bowl should be." Bianca Lange laughed then, the sound quick and careless as someone who believed nothing...
The metal cold bit into my wrist and the sound of the handcuff closing was louder than I expected. "Do you ever love me?" he asked, his chin tilted up as if waiting for a verdict. I tapped his cheek with the pads of my fingers like a joke. "No." "Enjoy your prison food then, my dear first-class merit," he murmured, and I laughed in the dark. The next morning, he vanished. "Joaquin Dorsey is gone," Cedric said, and the words slid off the meeting table like a dropped plate. "Guard...
I remember the moment like a snap of cold light — the woods had been a quiet threat, the twelve of us pinned between fear and tiredness, and then I cried out what felt like the only lifeline I still had. "Sage? Sage, is that you? Sage, Sage, Sage?" I shouted. He materialized as if summoned by bad gossip: disinterested, pale, and unhurried. "You're noisy," Sage Chambers said. His voice was thin as frost. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry. I woke you," I blurted, hands lifting in an apology that...
They had sold me six years ago. Today I came back to see my parents, and the only light waiting was two slabs of stone. "I came back," I told the earth, because there was no one left to hear me. "Casey? Are you sure she can do this?" a voice asked behind me. Cooper Briggs stood to the side, his hands jammed deep in his pockets, eyes like two small frightened birds. "I can," I said. "I will." He watched me kneel, touch the cool concrete of both graves, not able to say my parents'...
My mother said the way to a man's heart was through his stomach. I held a warm stomach in my hands and tasted nothing but metal and old lies. "Desmond," I whispered, because names make things real. "You always did love two things: your appetite and your secrets." I didn't say it to a living man. I said it to the body on my bed, to the neat row of stitches I had just finished. "Why did you do it?" I asked the warm skin. "Why did you think you could hide?" His face was peaceful...
They told me to think of it as a career, not a calamity. I thought of it as both. "I don't understand why you're keeping that studio," Joyce said the first time she leaned so close to me the perfume on her hair blurred the edge of my vision. "You could sell, Keegan. Walk away." "I like it," I answered. "Why would I sell a thing I built?" "You like her," she said simply, and smiled as if she had just solved a math problem. "You don't know anything about us," I said. "Then teach...
I was born under a late September sky in a village that seemed to tuck itself into the ribs of the mountains. I remember the cold brick wall of my first home like a shape of comfort I never quite claimed. I was Amelie Cruz — or at least that paper says so now — but my name, like everything about me, was decided by hands that did not stay. “Keep her,” my mother said once, with tears she refused to show anyone else. “I can’t carry another fine for a birth. You look after her, please.” “Why...
I open my eyes to fluorescent lights and the sound of a nurse's shoes scuffing away like wind through dry leaves. "You finally woke up," the nurse says, breathless and relieved. "Your husband and son have been here for days." She hurries out before I can ask anything sensible. Finley Drake pushes the door. He looks older—sharper cheekbones, less of that teenage softness I remember. His hand is gentle as he helps me sit. "Are you okay?" he asks. His voice is the one I've been holding...
I never thought the hallway light would go dim enough to make my heart jump. The elevator sighed open and he stood there—long limbs pressed into a long coat, taller than I remembered, silhouette like someone who had learned to take up space. For a moment my fingers forgot the keys in my hand. "You're home early," I said before I could think to be sharp. "Hi, Kaitlyn," he said. His voice had dropped, a low thing that belonged to grown-up mornings and late-night meetings. "Long...
I remember a gray noon, the kind of afternoon when rain seems undecided. I remember my phone slipping from my fingers and the sky cracking like someone had split open a drum. Then the world went dark, and when I woke I was in the middle of a battlefield, standing very still under a sky that still smelled like lightning. "Where am I?" I said. "No idea," a voice answered—metallic and cheeky. "But congratulations, Halo Meyer. You have just been claimed." I yelped. The voice came from...
Part One — You and Only You I was Lydia Blake. Three years of college. Three years of quiet, foolish worship. Three years of collecting courage and excuses and phone numbers that led me here: a rumor on the confession board and a dozen laughing comments tagging the one who had lived in my chest like a crystal idol. "—Isn't that Lydia Blake? @Frederick Fontaine, come see, someone's stealing your girl!" someone posted. I looked at the comments, shut my phone, and let the silence gather...
I am Joselyn Riley. I grew up being "the perfect child" people compared to others. I went to the city's top university, I was a ten-time debate finalist, I scored almost perfect in the GRE. I should have had a future everyone envied. "I killed my parents," the headlines screamed. "I hid the bodies in the freezer." They were right about the freezer. They were wrong about why. The world had already decided what I was before the law had finished speaking. "August fourth," I say now,...
Part I — I Lost to You, Underclassman “Morning, senior,” he said, still half asleep, arm hooked around my waist. I almost tumbled off the bed before his hand tightened and pulled me close again. Warmth, a clean, sharp smell like rain on pavement. For a second I thought of some perfume called “After-Last-Night.” “What—” I pushed him away and sat up, inundated by indignation and embarrassment. “What happened last night?” Avery Lemaire smiled with that barely-there curl at the corner...
I woke up to darkness and a weight across my hips, and for a second I thought the floor had turned into sea. Then my hand found skin and the world made a different kind of sense: warm, slow, breathing. "Who is—" I started, and my voice came out thin. A hotel lamp clicked on somewhere; a strip of weak light painted the man beneath me. He looked like a photograph come to life: black eyebrows, a nose that would photograph well from any angle, lips that might have been carved for a movie...
"I can feel the wind pulling at my dress," I said, and the city sounded small beneath us. "Gillian," he choked, "don't—" "I said I'm going," I smiled the way I'd practiced for years. "Am I doing it right?" "Gillian, please." Graham Clement's voice broke. He was on his knees, a man who had never knelt to anyone I knew. "Do you remember when Mom used to call you 'little knight'?" I asked, the wind stealing my words. "Stop—" he sounded like a child. "Please, Gillian." "I am about...
