Quick reads you can finish in 10-30 minutes
Found 1964 short novels
I still remember the flight number burning on the boarding pass, the storm that pushed us back, and the way the world narrowed to the small, persistent voice in my head that said I would propose at midnight. "I'll be waiting," Ellie said earlier that week. "Don't be late," I told her. "I'll make it worth the wait." The plane touched down at three in the morning. My phone lit up before the cabin lights came on—the caller ID was a name I had not seen for four years: Ellie...
I woke to a bitter medicine spoon scraping my lips and someone murmuring over me. The taste was hatefully familiar: astringent, galling, the kind that makes your throat clamp shut. "Don't move," a soft male voice said. I cracked an eye. White silk curtains hung around me in tidy layers, and a young man in sky-blue robes set a porcelain bowl on the table. He looked at me like someone watches a broken bird. "You're awake," he said. "Who—" I tried to sit up and pain stabbed through my...
I never meant to be anyone’s treasure. I meant only to be a clerk who could eat three meals and not freeze in winter. "Write it down," Uri said on my first morning in the palace, and his voice was already a command I had to obey. "I will," I answered, and meant it for the books, not for him. They called me a起居郎 in the records — the man who tracked the emperor’s waking and sleeping and every word that slipped out at inconvenient hours. In truth, I was a woman named Emmalyn Colon who had...
I was always louder than I needed to be. "I am Autumn Garcia," I said to the little camera in the campus square, tilting my head, smiling the kind of smile that had taken me centuries to practice. "Why not? Why shouldn't I be?" The student reporter blinked and asked, "Do you think you're the most beautiful student at Southdance University?" "I..." I let my chin dip, let my laugh come out soft. "How could I not be?" "Then what about Bella? What do you think of Bella...
I opened the company chat and typed what everyone was secretly thinking. "Why is there no holiday for Qingming? Does the boss not have an ancestral grave?" I sent it like a dare, like throwing a stone into still water. Silence returned, but it wasn't the polite kind. It was the kind of silence where everyone holds their breath, waiting to see whether the water will splash or swallow you. A minute later, Duncan Denton — our director who loved to forward motivational posts at three in...
I remember the instant my world folded: Drew Jorgensen hit the tiles and the sky seemed to fall with him. "Is he—" I barely got the question out before a woman in scrubs pushed by. "We need consent. He needs an emergency craniotomy. Sign here, pay here." "Save him. Please," I begged, fumbling the pen. "He'll be—" "Stay calm," the doctor said. "Calm helps." I signed. I called everyone I could think of. We scraped together fifty thousand in a blur. I watched the red light above the...
I am pretending to be Isla Amin. I said those words to myself like a prayer and like a lie at once. "You are Isla now," I wrote on paper the first night under the bridal canopy. "You must not speak." Arden Fontaine pushed the bridal curtain aside with one steady hand. He looked like a portrait come alive—too handsome to be real, too calm to be harmless. I almost said it—"He's beautiful"—but the costume would have collapsed. I was the stand-in bride; I had to keep my mouth shut. Arden's...
1 The world had already decided how my story would end when I crawled out of the mass grave. "They married. Peace returned. The villain was stripped, humiliated, and buried." That was the last line I remembered from the battered book I’d read once in a fever, and that was where people said the story stopped. I did not expect to find him alive. "I can carry him," I said, my voice small to my own ears, but steady. The man between my arms was lighter than I expected, and heavier than my...
I killed myself. On New Year’s Eve, when families were together and the city glittered with fake warmth. I thought death would be silence and relief. Instead, I stood beside my own body and a thin man in white and paper asked my name. "What’s your name?" he asked, flipping a long book like a bored librarian. "Gillian Bird," I said. I wanted him to take me away, to file my name and let me be done. I wanted to sleep forever. He looked at the book. He frowned. "You have years left....
I learned to sew before I learned to answer for myself. "I will take a concubine," Jagger said the moment he crossed our threshold that spring. He spoke as if the season itself had instructed him. I kept stitching. The unborn child in my belly had been with me five months; my fingers fumbled but I kept at my needle because that was what I could do. Only two little sets of garments were good enough to be shown. "Madam," he said louder when I did not look up, "did you hear? I will take a...
"No, the Emperor came back holding a woman who might be alive or dead," Jessica whispered, eyes wide as coins. "Oh? And the allegedly dead have no opinion?" I said, smiling as if I were reading a joke. "Madam! You'll lose favor! You can't joke now!" Jessica's small hand trembled on the hem of my robe. "Then what should one do, according to you?" I asked, tilting my head. "Follow the old way—arsenic," she said, producing a tiny packet like a conspirator. "I think I'll take care of...
I woke to the alarm I knew too well and slapped the bedside table. "Get up, get up," I told myself out loud. "Are you sure this is real?" my own voice asked. "It will be if I don't waste another second," I said. "Why are you packing three hundred packs of noodles?" my mother asked from the doorway when I shoved one last box into a crate. "Because there will be a second chance," I said. "Because I remember." "Remember what?" she asked, and her eyes had the tired softness of...
"I'll be quick," I told the class chat, fingers trembling even as I typed. "Stock up in the dorm," I wrote. "Keep it low-key." "You sure?" Bianca asked when she came back and I told her over the sink. Her voice was tight, but practical. "My mom said the city's got a problem." "I called my parents," I said. "They said it's serious. Just—don't advertise it." "Okay." Kailani's face softened. "Let's go together." Jimena nodded, but I could see her hands were already busy packing a...
I still remember the first time someone called me "wife" in the middle of the dining hall. "I found you, wife!" he shouted, and before I could think a polite refusal, he lept and hugged me like I belonged to him. I froze, then spat out the first word that came to mind. "What the—!" Without thinking, muscle memory from a lifetime of wild farm chores took over. I heaved and flipped him over my shoulder. He landed on the linoleum with a miserable little cry on his face. Around us, voices...
I remember the first time people started pointing at our door like it hung some story between its hinges. "Look—it's them," someone nudged. "The monk who gave it all up and the witch he took." "They say she left the mountain for him," another voice whispered, loud enough for the whole room to hear. I laughed and leaned against Laurent. He smelled like was always the same: wood smoke and a faint clean salt from the river where he still liked to wash his hands. Guests at the inn gathered...
I never planned to be a hero. I planned to hide, eat, and sleep—do nothing more than keep living comfortably in a building I had just inherited. "I am not going outside," I told the air, and then I opened another bag of instant noodles. "It's a good plan," Edison Robertson said from the doorway. "For now." I am Jemma Kristensen. I owned a big old building with an eight-floor layout: store on the ground floor, my home on the seventh, and empty floors in between. I had spent a small...
I remember the pond as cold, dark, and traitorous. I remember the sound of laughter and then the sudden hollow silence. I remember hands—someone's push—and then the slick, cold world of the water closing over my face. I remember opening my eyes hours later to the soft lamp glow of my own bed and hearing, "Isabella, you're awake?" "Am I?" I croaked. My voice came out like paper. "You're awake," said Red Bean, always brisk, always practical. "Drink this, miss. You burned with fever most of...
I never imagined a single misstep — a choice made for money and survival — would put me in the middle of two worlds: funeral lilies on one side and a sixteen-year-old storm on the other. My name is Frankie Arnold. I was twenty-three the day I learned how easily life could be rearranged like pieces on a poker table. "Is he your nephew?" Preston Cox squinted over his glasses like he could see my life in a ledger. "He's my son," I said and sipped my tea as if the word weighed...
I have been in love with a voice for most of my life. "I'll be at 10:30," he texted, "Room 2709." I planned like a soldier and dressed like a secret. When the elevator dinged, I stepped into 2710 instead. He was closer than I expected and farther than I wanted. Nicolas Brown and I had grown up on the same street. Our parents were friends, our afternoons were shared, our arguments were small. He was light when I needed light and stone when he wanted to be admired. He was famous...
I was born to a small trading house that once had more luck than sense, and I learned young how to trade smiles for chances. "My name is Joanna Chandler," I told myself like a prayer, standing by the crooked pear tree in the garden at the high house where we lived as guests. "I will not be small forever." "Table manners, Joanna," Luisa Bertrand said one morning, clicking the beads on her wrist like a rosary. "Look like a lady. Make a line for power." "Yes, Mother," I said, with the...
