Life Hack: Five short books to read to reach your reading goal before the end of the year

Small Things Like These, by Claire Keegan

Clocking in at just 116 pages, the book that inspired the recent film with Cillian Murphy can be read in just a few hours. When asked about her book’s length, author Claire Keegan said: “Elegance, to me, is writing just enough” and added its lead character Bill Furlong “isn’t someone who says much” so a “longer novel would not have suited his personality.” It’s also a timely read, with the events of the book being set just before Christmas 1985 when Furlong encounters the complicit silences of a small community controlled by the Church.

Orbital, by Samantha Harvey

This year’s Booker Prize winner has 129 pages and follows a team of astronauts in the International Space Station as they circle earth. Samantha Harvey’s work examines the fragility of human life, our link to the planet and its connection to our humanity. The Booker Prize judges praised it for its “beauty and ambition” as well as its author’s “extraordinary intensity of attention to the precious and precarious world we share”.

This Is How You Lose The Time War, by Amal El Mohtar and Max Gladstone

At 208 pages, this is an accessible science fiction book about two time-travelling rivals who fall in love despite the time and space separating them. Co-written by two award-winning writers, it is an epic love story between two pen pals on either side of the war referenced in the book’s title.

By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept, by Elizabeth Smart

There are only 160 pages in By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept, Elizabeth Smart’s passionate and fictional account of her intense love affair with the poet George Barker. Originally published in 1945, this classic work of poetic prose has retained all of its beauty and power six decades on.

Heart of Darkness, by Joseph Conrad

A classic novella from 1899, Heard of Darkness sees Joseph Conrad’s narrator Charles Marlow recount his journey — both physical and psychological — in search of the infamous ivory trader Kurtz. It confronts the horrors of Western colonialism and how European powers exploited Africa for its resources.