Quick reads you can finish in 10-30 minutes
Found 1964 short novels
I woke up wrapped in purple silk, and the first thing I noticed was the sound of horses outside and the smell of wood smoke. My name is Haylee Petrov. A minute before, I was in my bedroom apartment, watching a fashion gala on TV. Now I blinked at a wooden beam, at lacquered furniture, at a paper lantern throwing soft light across a face I didn't know. "Who are you?" I whispered. "Haylee," I answered myself aloud, because the mouth moved and the word tasted like my real name. It felt like...
I never thought a single apartment key could feel like a tiny blade of freedom, but when I turned it and stepped into my own cramped unit for the first time, I felt something rip inside me — a quiet anger and a clear plan. "You're really doing this?" Fabian asked that morning, looking at the two cardboard boxes in the living room like they belonged to someone else. "Yes," I said. "I'm taking the room. It's close to my office. It'll be easier." Fabian looked at his mother as she sat at...
"I can't breathe!" I hooked my toes, pushed against cold river mud, and the world tilted. "Kayla! Save our child!" someone shouted from a distance. The name hit me like a punch. Kayla? That was my name now. Not mine, the other one. I kicked. I surfaced, coughing river water, and spat until my throat stung. "Griffin, hurry!" a plump woman shrieked in a voice that sounded decades older than anything I knew. I blinked at faces. They wore rough cloth and short jackets. A red sun burned...
I crushed the cigarette under my shoe and watched the ash fall into the gutter. "I told you to wait in the car," I said without looking up. The driver grunted. "You sure about this, Cullen? He talks smooth." "I like smooth talkers," I said. "They tell you more than they mean." I am Cullen Price. I run a small detective office. I find lost dogs, catch cheating lovers, and sometimes find things people want buried. Hazel Clement—an old woman with a dry throat and steady hands—came to...
"Stop it, Leoni! You're ruining my stream," Cael barked at my door like it was a crime scene. "I wasn't ruining it," I shouted back, hands still on the locked knob. "I was supporting you—honest! Husband!" I sang each syllable like a fool. "Wait until I report you for disturbing the public order and have you arrested," he threatened, stepping closer so the wood of the door trembled. "Try it. I'm a law-abiding citizen," I shot back, sticking my tongue out through the crack. The phone...
I am the imperial chronicler, the one who writes down what the emperor does and says. I write in neat columns and I dream that someday my own name will sit on a page that people point to long after I am gone. "You want to be remembered?" Alejandro Mendez asked when he first caught me staring at my own handwriting. "Who doesn't?" I answered, and the next night he gave me a chance I never expected. "I'll write you into history tonight," he said, all solemn and troublesome. "He...
I was born as the second prince in the northern court. I say it plainly: I grew up inside silk and shadow. My mother was a favored consort, and my childhood smelled of perfume and incense. People called her the light of the palace. "Do you remember how I used to say it?" she would joke. "Princes are like iron. Cold, steady. One day they'll be a blade." "I remember," I'd say, because those small betrayals of memory made her laugh. But when I was five, they killed her with a decree as...
I never wanted a court that sang praises and whispered doubts about my private life. I wanted a quiet bowl of porridge, a warm corner, a single promise kept. "When I married you," he had said once, "I will keep only you." I kept that in my chest like a small plum seed, and I tended it. "Wolfgang, we are not as we used to be," Edgar Olson said one afternoon as he folded the morning reports. I had been lying against the cushions, a book half open in my hands, the inked characters blurring...
I still remember the way Knox shouted at me, loud enough to make the ceramic mug tremble on the counter. "Can you stop fussing with it?" he snapped. "It's just a cat. Just wash it. I'm going to play basketball." "I asked you to hold the shower head," I said, my voice trembling more from surprise than anger. "Just hold it for two minutes." "Two minutes? I told you—" He cut himself off and left the sentence hanging like a broken match. "Knox," I said, quieter, "it’s not about two...
I remember the first time I realized Deacon Blevins liked my sister more than me. "Small miss cries ugly," he said once, crouching by a lantern stand as if it were the truest fact in the world. I wiped my hands on my skirt and glared at him. "Who told you that?" He smiled with a devil in it, not a bad smile, and answered, "Your sister is beautiful." That should have been a small thing. It was only a few words, only a tone. But I kept hearing them for days afterward, like a pebble...
I remember the exact rasp of ash when I set fire to the Chancellory House—the night I decided I would rather burn with my pride than live as anyone’s humiliation. I remember how the flames licked the dark like an accusation and how, through heat and smoke, the face I had loved for sixteen years looked like an altar I could not climb anymore. “You are going to watch us burn,” I told no one then, but I said it to the sky. When I opened my eyes again, I was standing by my window exactly one...
I never thought the day I agreed to be someone’s “godmom” would wreck my calm life and rearrange my heart. “It’s settled,” Blythe Ibarra said when she first grabbed my hand at the office pantry. Her voice was loud and proud, like she’d decided the weather for the day. “You sure you don’t mean god-aunt?” I tried to joke. “Young people and labels.” Blythe waved me off. “Just be there. My son will come by tonight. He needs a godmom. You’re perfect.” “I don’t even have kids,” I said,...
I remember the first night they closed the coffin lid and locked it from the outside. I remember the smell of lacquer and the heavy quiet, like a room holding its breath. I remember the old nursemaid's hand, rough and warm, squeezing mine until the knuckles whitened. "You relax, little wife," Guadalupe Jorgensen said into my ear. "He was a good boy. He will like you." "He will? He is a skeleton," I whispered back, and my voice shook in a way I hadn't planned. "He's a skull. Who likes a...
"I can't keep giving him money," I said, the words small and flat in the kitchen where silence had grown heavy like dust. "He swore he'd stop," my father replied, looking at me as if speaking to a child who had broken a curious ornament. "He promised in front of everyone." "He promised he'd cut off his hand if he gambled again," I said. My voice trembled and the memory came back cold and sharp: Gavin Moller on his knees at my parents' house, a kitchen knife glinting. He pressed the...
I was raised as the only daughter who mattered. The palace always felt like my skin—tight, familiar, protected. I learned early how the silk rustled, how footmen timed their bows to my laughter, how my father, the Emperor Cruz Roux, would incline his head just so when I entered a hall. They told me I was loved without measure. Then one spring, they carried another girl into the palace and called her "returned." They called her Isabelle Vieira. They put her in gilded robes and named her...
I told my mother, "Finnian has been seeing someone." She didn't wait for me to explain. "Finnian? No way. He looks so steady. Don't be silly." "I mean... there is another woman," I said, blunt and quiet. My mother blinked, then flared: "What will you do? Divorce? Where will you live?" "I was joking," I lied and stood. Her voice pushed words into me like a tide. I left while she scolded the air. The street crowded around me, everyone with places to be, and I felt like the only one...
I never meant to fall in love for real. I signed up to be a public girlfriend for two years because they said it would help him, and because I was a fan before I was anything else. I thought I could keep being the cheerful, unpaid assistant to his star. Then one night, the host asked about marriage on live television, and the moment the question hit me, something inside me cracked. "I'm done," I told myself. I typed the statement, closed my laptop, and left. Two days later, he was on my...
"I landed at Kawasaki University today. The gate was so grand that for a second I thought I had walked into someone else's dream." "I told you, Lea, don't stare like that," Kiley said as she skipped down from a low, elegant car, curls bouncing. "This place is ours now." "I know," I answered, because the truth was I had barely slept last night thinking of this morning, of classes, of the pear trees behind the track, and of the small, stubborn promise my father had made about me becoming a...
I woke in a dark room and for a stupid, steady second I thought I was late for work. "Where am I?" I whispered. The room smelled faintly of tatami and damp paper. The light was almost gone. I pushed my palm against the futon and felt my own heartbeat. I sat up. A single low lamp on the far shelf revealed a tidy, Japanese‑style guestroom. My clothes were on a chair. My face in the little bathroom mirror was mine. "I'm Nathalie David," I said aloud, mostly to prove I still had a name. "I...
I was fourteen the night they brought me into that house. I remember the streetlight bruising my wet shoes and the quiet in my throat. I remember Annabelle Hughes's hands—soft, sure—putting a blanket over me and saying, "You are home now." She called me her daughter from the first morning I learned the rhythm of their kitchen. "You're safe here," she told me. "We're a family." Safe was a strange word that first year, because Axl Santos lived in that house too. He lived like summer itself:...
