Quick reads you can finish in 10-30 minutes
Found 1964 short novels
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...
I am Jadyn Bates. The night Colin Ibrahim asked for a divorce was a bright, cruel afternoon. He sat on our balcony swing, the little string lights still twinkling even in daylight, and he said three words that made my heart stop. "We should divorce." I almost dropped my phone. I asked, "Why?" "He came back." Colin said it like a fact. He put his cigarette out in the ashtray and did not look at me. His right hand trembled. He had always been good at making final words sound...
I never thought a single night could rewrite the map of everything I believed about myself. "Ivan, get up," my father shouted from the doorway like the weather itself had turned against me. "Ivan—" He meant Leoni, but everyone in my family called me Leoni the way others keep a nickname in reserve. "Leoni, get up. Look at what you've done." "I'll sleep a little more," I mumbled, burying my face deeper in the pillows. My hair was a dark curtain, and the sunlight on the curtains made...
I had been back in the marquis' house for only a night when the first thing that made me blush was the bed. It was yellow huanghuali wood, carved and glossy, old enough to be polite and loud enough to tell secrets. "Does it always groan like that?" I asked the steward as I tried to hide my embarrassment. Abel Nasir looked at me without surprise. "It's an old bed, Madam Leanna. The wood remembers." "Remember what?" I demanded, though my heartbeat already remembered too much. "Love...
I wake up with the taste of iron in my mouth and a memory like a broken film reel: a crash, a jail cell, a cheap leather bag thrown at my face, a delivery of a bright university letter that wasn't mine. I close my eyes and count heartbeats. The room around me is the same as it was the first time I woke into this life: sunlight crosshatching through thin curtains, a poster on the wall with a math formula someone once circled, the old wooden desk where I learned to copy answers and keep...
I still remember the ping on my phone like a small, impossible bell. It was midnight, I had been on the subway for an hour after a long coding session, and I had just forwarded a crowdfunding link for a sick classmate. I leaned my head against the window and saw the transfer notification. "Zander Girard transferred you 500,000.00." I almost fell off my seat. My hands went numb. I tapped the notification and then the chat that followed. "Which hospital? I'll come stay with...
December came like a verdict. "Ivy, your brother's plane—" the stranger's voice on the phone sounded like a thing I had never met before. It was hollow and polite and cruel. I ran. I ran because there was nowhere else to run. When I pushed open the front door, the house smelled like boiled cabbage and old grief. Dad sat at the dining table with his back to me, shoulders hunched like he had been carved that way. Mom’s hands were pressed into her face, the kind of face I had never seen...
I was supposed to spend the sixth day of the Lunar New Year visiting my grandfather, laughing at jokes about which niece had the best marriage, and pretending every family life was tidy. Instead, a careless remark from an aunt landed like a stone in my chest. "Did you know Blake dated Stella before?" Aunt June said as if gossip about other people's love lives was harmless. "How long?" I asked out loud, trying to sound casual. "About a month," she mumbled, suddenly like she had spoken...
"I slammed the door so hard the glass shook." "I told you to stop," Roman said. "I told you nothing," I said. "I told them everything." Roman Bentley did not argue. He folded his hands like he always did when I was about to do something reckless. He had that patient face that made me trust him since we were children in the same neighborhood. "I won't let them bury this," he said. "Say it again. Who did it?" "It was Corinna," I said. "And Delilah helped her." Roman's jaw...
I never meant to file for divorce. I packed the papers because I had to know, and because I had finally decided I wasn't going to be patient with a life that felt like a loop of polite lies. "You're going to sign them?" I said, lifting the packet so the sunlight through his office blinds made the paper glow. Elwood Hayashi looked at me like I had suggested a change in the weather. "Don't be dramatic, Mariah." "Elwood," I said, and put the papers on his desk, "we need to talk. I want a...
1 The knock on my door came on the eight hundred and seventh day after we broke up. I opened it because I had to — because the landlord's note was loose on the floor and because curiosity still bit me like a small dog. The man on the threshold looked both familiar and impossible to place. "Tomas?" My mouth made the name before my brain could stop it. He blinked. "Aurora." "You have a nerve." I shut the door partway but didn't push him off the step. The ten square meters of my...
I remember the day my father told me about the three million like it was a currency for fate rather than for a bank account. "My company can't keep going," he said. "Marry him. Save us." "I will," I replied, and the words came out like a business plan. I didn't intend to fall in love. I intended to buy time—and to buy my father's redemption. "I am Valentina Estrada," I told myself the night I signed the papers. "You are a long loan, not a life sentence." Beau Roth arrived like a...
I fell from a tree and into steam. "Welcome, Host 001," a metallic voice chimed inside my head as hot water wrapped me like a trap. "You have bound to the Ravaged Hero System." I spluttered and swallowed a mouthful of sulfur-scented pool water. "What?" "You are in the alternate dynasty of the Northern Realm. The male lead, the Regent Xander Luna, has had his fate siphoned. Change the fate of the original heroine and reclaim the Regent's fortune of life force. Complete the tasks and you...
I had been married three years and still had no child. "You've been married three years?" A voice in the garden said, warm and conspiratorial. "Three years no heir — you should pay attention." "I am paying attention," I answered. "But he does not like me." They exchanged looks. "Then be clever, Lenore. Be clever." Lenore. They called me Lenore Smith now, though I never had a surname that felt like mine. I had been raised by the Crown Prince as if I belonged to his household, and...
I woke up to blood. "I turned the tap to wash my face," I said once to no one, "and red came out instead of clear." It started like a small absurd joke, the kind that can either make you laugh or make you panic. I laughed in the bathroom mirror, because I had to. My white shirt hung on the chair, my black shoes sat like two dark promises by the door. I reached for the towel I had used the night before and rubbed at my face. The scent that rose was wrong, like iron and old paper. "You...
I spat salt water and grit out of my mouth and blinked at a roof that threatened to fall through the sky. "Where am I?" I said aloud, though my throat felt like dry paper. A boy with eyes too old for his face leaned over me with a wooden cup and poured water down my throat. He was five, maybe six, all knees and big, terrified eyes. "You're awake!" he cried. "Sister, you finally woke up." "I—" I pushed the fog from my head. My body ached as if someone had taken strings and jerked...
I knew the exact chapter and paragraph where I was supposed to kneel, beg, and die. "Clayton—no, Emperor Fielding," I mouthed under my breath as the carved beams above me watched. "You have read the same book as I did." "Camilla Simpson," the Emperor intoned from the dragon throne, "Jiang household is cruel, immoral, and plotting to murder the heir. Take her away." I had been reading last night. I had, against my better sense, finished this particular guilty-pleasure novel. I knew the...
"I remember his small finger poking my cheek," I say first, because that memory never leaves me. "Do you remember, Keegan?" Keegan Dillon blinks at the window and smiles like he always does — that shallow, honest curve by his mouth, the dimple that looks like a quiet secret. "You mean when you cried because I called you 'little fennel bean'?" he replies, voice soft as dust. "I'm not a bean," I reply, and the line between us is both a joke and a map of every day we ever shared. We have...
"I can't carry both. You take one." I dropped a suitcase on the cheap runner and watched the man in the crisp suit lift the other like it weighed nothing. "Thanks," I said. "I'm Bridget." He smiled without trying to be charming. "Cairo sent me. Welcome." "I said I wanted a kitchen big enough to film in. I did not say I wanted a palace for five hundred a month." "You did," he said, opening the door. "And you got it. The price has terms." I stepped inside and my breath went...
I had been stubborn even before I remembered being stubborn. "I don't go back," I said, mouth half full of hospital takeout, and the system blinked at me like an offended assistant. "You are the white moonlight," it said. "You must play out your role." "I ate vegetarian for years," I told it. "My lips had forgotten meat. You ruined my dinner by showing up late. No." "You will die early if you do not comply." "Then die early," I said, and meant it. The light on my forearm...
