In a year with some extended reading projects and some very long novels, it’s been a treat to have some shorter (and, sometimes, simpler) stories like these, in the stacks. Come November (just a few days away), you might be looking to add some novellas like these to your stacks—with #NovNov, hosted by Cathy and Rebecca, in mind.

Nnedi Okorafor’s Binti (2015) is one of those rapid-immersion novellas, the first in her trilogy of the same name. Readers are plunged into a moment of change for its heroine, as she leaves behind everything she’s known, in order to honour her people by being the first of them to attend Oomza University, worlds away. “‘Tribal’: that’s what they called humans from ethnic groups too remote and ‘uncivilized’ to regularly send students to attend Oomza Uni.”

A phrase or a single modifier is all the explanation given to situate us in custom and habit, so that we can appreciate Binti’s sense of dislocation, without fully understanding her culture’s history and legacy. Only when the story is nearly over, does anyone make clear statements as to the political underpinnings of this coming-of-age story: an older girl transforming into a young woman, capable of even more than she’d previously dreamed.

“He was angry and always speaking out about the way my people were maltreated by the Khoush majority despite the fact that they needed us and our astrolabes to survive. He as always calling them eviel, though he’d never traveled to a Khoush country or known a Khoush. His anger was rightful, but all that he said was from what he didn’t truly know.”

The follow-ups are Home (2018) and The Night Masquerade (2019). Each volume won the Hugo for Best Novella in its respective year, and Binti also claimed the Nebula.

In 2024, I read the third in Nghi Vo’s Singing Hills cycle, and I quite liked it, but I wholly enjoyed When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain (2020). Because it’s a cycle, one can begin reading at any point, but I’m happy that I met the story-collector cleric, Chih, when they were doing more travelling than sitting.

Now, Chih’s neixin (their sassy note-taker recorder bird, Almost Brilliant) is at home, sitting on some eggs, and we meet Si-yu and her mammoth, Piluk. In Almost Brilliant’s absence, there is no other perspective on the tales told here, other than Chih’s and a tiger’s—there’s a delightful back-and-forth, with the tiger’s refrain being how sad it is that humans must tell stories with such a slant when, alternatively, they could say how things happened.

“Neither ghosts nor bandits would bother two people on a mammoth, however, and anyway, Chih had never been on a mammoth before. What was the point of being a Singing Hills cleric if they didn’t get to ride a mammoth when the opportunity arose?”

One previous book is The Empress of Salt and Fortune (2020) and the three follow-ups are Mammoths at the Gates (2023), The Brides of High Hill (2025), A Mouthful of Dust (2025) and, new this year, A Long and Speaking Silence (2026).

I dragged my heels reading Banana Yoshimoto’s Moshi Moshi (2010; Trans. Asa Yoneda, 2016) because I think it’s the last of her books in translation: now I will have to either reread or learn Japanese. It was a fitting conclusion to the arc, a story about grief and how a mother and daughter cope in the wake of their father and husband’s death. In her usual spare and stark style, the women confront his absence in different ways, and there are some diversions (as with the daughter’s waitressing work) which also bring out new facets of character and theme.

At times I have fallen into the spaces between her words and felt wholly unmoved; at the right time, I find her stories rich—and, even, profound. It was the right time for me to read Moshi Moshi, on a very humid summer night stuck indoors with fire warnings blazing across the map.

“It had happened, and there was nothing to be done about that. There were plenty of people in the world who’d been through far worse. It had come as a huge shock to me because it had been so far out of the normal flow of things until then, but it wasn’t out of the realm of things that were possible in this world.”

Robert Seethaler’s The Last Movement (2020; Trans. Charlotte Collins) taps a similar vein, but with a titch more sentimentality. It landed in my stack with Susan’s recommendation. (And perhaps other readers too? His covers seem so familiar.) As a music student in high school, our final exam one year was to be able to identify pieces of music at random as our teacher played them, including as many relevant details as possible—if not the specific piece and composer—and every week we reviewed. Mahler was trouble for me; I routinely guessed him when I shouldn’t and overlooked him when I should.

A story like Seethaler’s would have brought Mahler off the page for me. Measured and clear throughout, the element of the story that stayed with me resided in an observer: I love the idea that even a casual encounter can ripple outwards and affect a meaningful change. But I wonder if I might not prefer another of his books.

“Sitting on the sundeck, Mahler contemplated the meaninglessness of life with a twinge of baleful resignation. Life was little more than a brief exhalation, a breath in the storm of the world, yet he loved it so much that his sadness at the futility of this love almost broke his heart.”

Conor Kerr’s Beaver Hills Forever (2025) was a must-read for me because his debut collection of linked stories, Avenue of Champions (reviewed for World Literature Today), stood out straightaway, and his first novel Prairie Edge did not disappoint either (it was eventually listed for that year’s Giller Prize). He’s also written two collections of poetry: An Explosion of Feathers (2021) and Old Gods (2023).

Beaver Hills Forever is a little like all the elements of his craft exploded: the rotating voices of four key characters (with a similar resonance to his stories), the themes of belonging and how we are judged as fitting and misfitting—by others and ourselves—and how the rub grinds us down or creates a spark (similar to his novel), in sharply observed scenes and inner musings that are sometimes lyrical and often precise. I flagged so many passages to share, and just thinking back to this read makes me smile, but it seems rude to interrupt this Métis/Ukrainian writer’s steady build of characterisation and connection, so here’s his beginning instead.

Aho,
Buddy can drop a bead on the sunrise
Stitch that right back up if he wanted
But really he just wants to see his kids
It’s been a few weeks, up here in camp.
Kids back with their mom in the city
Good lady that hate the way he couldn’t
Fulfill a promise to not end up like all the others

(For more of the Beaver Hills, in what’s called Alberta today, check out Dwayne Donald’s short recording via Indigenous Literary Studies, about how we can connect with the Earth and with one another. All the other novellas discussed here are from the Big presses, but this book by Conor Kerr is published by indie press Arsenal Pulp on what’s today the west coast of Canada.)

Pictured alongside are some of the novellas I’ve enjoyed this year, and I’ve also just started one by Joyce Carol Oates. Looking ahead to #NovNov, a few others stacked here to tempt me next month too.

How about you: any outstanding novellas in your recent reading?