Hosted by Cathy and Rebecca with weekly themes and a link collector, the first week of this event invites participants to “tell us about any novellas you have read since last NovNov” (it’s okay not to follow the five week’s themes exactly and, instead, allow them to mesh with other reading plans).

Here are some of my recent favourites.

Jen Falkner’s Susanna Hall, Her Book (2022) has, at its core—perhaps unsurprisingly—a book: “Her favourite reading was the well-thumbed, yellowed, stained receipt book, with its platters of wax on the front cover. It contained the history of her mother’s married life, recipes for pudding pies, tansies and biscuits, the very smells and flavours of childhood for Susanna. Recipes for ink, with several variations….”

But the story itself contains more plot than that would lead you to believe. Her historical setting feels intimate and familiar, relying on details rather than facts to secure readers’ trust. “Feeble light fell on a bowl of hazelnuts and a game of cards played with a stained and greasy deck.” And if all that’s scant on detail, there’s good reason. This feels like the most delicious kind of novella, the kind that steadily builds tension around a secret—one person’s secret is another’s betrayal—and hinges on a decision that feels both shocking and inevitable, before it delivers a wholly satisfying resolution. Recently shortlisted for the Ottawa Book Award, this is another quality title from Fish Gotta Swim. (Website here.)

Carla Guelfenbein’s One In Me I Never Loved (2019; Translated by Neil Davidson, 2021) is another one of my favourite kinds of novellas: a largely interior, prismatic work that reflects either many characters who are experiencing similar emotional states or many characters whose lives are connected in more tangible ways that are only gradually understood. With Guelfenbein’s narrative, both of these are true, and I thoroughly enjoyed seeing how different situations mirrored one another and how certain, curious elements resolved. But, in fact, this is presented as a novel, and although sometimes I believe this is solely a marketing decision (more readers are comfortable with novels than novellas), in this case, I wonder if it’s not true: it’s short but one can imagine this story being much longer, incorporating other points-of-view, allowing other settings to be more prominent, more fully exploring some of the questions that arise. It doesn’t feel as though it’s inevitably this length. Even though it’s not reflective of the story, here’s a bookish quotation I flagged: “The next year, against all her grandmother’s and mother’s objections, she went back to school. She hasn’t stopped reading since.”

Richard Wagamese’s A Perfect Likeness brings together two novellas previously published: Him Standing (2013) and The Next Sure Thing (2011). Orca’s reissue, which seems designed to appeal to YA readers, opens with an introduction by Waubgeshig Rice which situates Wagamese in Anishnaabe culture but also highlights the important role he played in supporting Rice’s writing career. (If his name sounds familiar, I just mentioned one of his books of non-fiction recently and he’s one of my MRE MustReadEverything authors with Medicine Walk a true favourite.) Him Standing is about a young woodcarver, taught the craft by his grandfather but, when the young carver seems to be haunted by an indescribable force, he must call on another kind of teaching to defend himself and his craft. The Next Sure Thing circles around a different kind of pressure that a young Anishnaabe man faces. Both stories are immediately engaging and relatable for readers who struggle to maintain a sense of equilibrium in a world which threatens to throw them off balance, literally or metaphorically.

“He smiled, but it was more like just pulling skin up over his teeth. There was no humor in it, no feeling. It was eerie. Haunting. Disturbing. He reached up and gripped my jaw with one hand. “If you can’t, things are really going to do downhill.”

I started reading Cary Fagan when one of his short story collections appeared on the Giller longlist, but as much as I enjoy his stories, The Student remains my favourite of his books so far. Mostly, I simply like his stuff. A previous novella was quite good too—delightfully bookish with an unexpected bonus of featuring one of my favourite Toronto library branches—but none of this prepared me for the strange, amusing novella, The Animals (2022). There’s a crime scene marked out with caution tape—“The nature of the tearing, the extreme violation of the muscles, the drag marks on the ground.”—and questions about that death, but mostly there’s an unsettling sense of humour simmering beneath the story. Set in a village that’s embraced the tourist industry and remade the buildings into a kind of fanciful medieval scene, focussing on a man whose business is reconstructing miniature models of all the businesses…it’s a shimmery story that feels half Wes-Anderson-film and half-Grimms-fairy-tale and half-The-Standups (which doesn’t add up because neither does the story and it’s not meant to either).

L. M. Montgomery was a career writer who earned regularly from her short stories, which are not as well known as her classic novel Anne of Green Gables (1908) and the ensuing Anne volumes (which she only wrote to please her fans and her publisher, because her own favourite amongst her characters was Emily, not Anne). The final volume that collects her short fiction is 2022’s Around the Hearth: Tales of Home and Family and, within it, is her novella “By Way of the Brick Oven” (originally published in the year of Anne), the story of how the three girls at Spruce Lodge must raise $70 to cover the interest on their home’s thousand-dollar mortgage. The answer lies in baked beans and brown bread made in the old brick oven to sell on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays. It’s a “humble enterprise” immediately and enthusiastically supported by their friends and neighbourhoods, but soon “almost everybody in Carleton patronized the young cooks.” As if that weren’t enough, there’s a family rift repaired along the way, with echoes of the Aunt-Josephine subplot in the Anne stories. The collection is gentle and predictable, though likely only of interest to LMM-completists.

“Dorrie, as usual, had made herself comfortable in the garret. She had put a cushion on the floor on which to sit, and another, its warm crimson contrasting with her black head, against the wall on which to lean; and she had brought up a pocket full of apples.”

Stanley Péan’s 2011 novella Taximan (translated by David Homel and published by Linda Leith in 2018) is a “portrait of urban North America through its displaced people who, despite their native sadness, turn up the music and drive.” Péan himself says it’s a “book inspired by stories I’ve heard and anecdotes I’ve experienced in the back seat of these vehicles”, “a series of telegraphic flashes”, and “reflections that are never longer than the taxi ride that set them in motion in the first place”. One person observes: “When you think about it, Québec has way more black writers than Dany [Laferrière] and me, and way more Blacks too, for that matter.” Another says: “Time had proven Hugh MacLennan wrong. Canada is not made up of two solitudes, but a multitude that follow their separate ways through the body politic, and will never meet.”  It’s surprisingly bookish and he reveals a trade secret along the way:

“All writers enjoy breaking into other people’s secret gardens to pick some radiant flower –or some evil herb they can slip into their work that they build with every passing day.”

Selva Almada’s Brickmakers (2013; Trans. Annie McDermott 2021) is my first exposure to this major Argentinian writer. Exposure feels correct because throughout I feel raw and vulnerable. The brickworks are physically exhausting and the tensions between two competing owners are off-the-scale. Each short chapter (one to three pages) feels like a blow. Readers are slammed between perspectives, forced to reorient to time and place each time. It’s possible to keep the two men, the two wives, the two (significant) children straight but the possibility of a blur feels like it’s part of the point: how the patterns of behaviour resemble one another, their relentlessness, and the reader’s revulsion. Moments of tenderness are tinged with brutality and, yet, the momentum has created such a desire for release that you can’t help but read on. (Someone recommended this: Reese? Susan? Who?)

“Meanwhile the music is always the same: the panting, the sound of fists, the cracking of knuckles before they land the first blow, the hiss of saliva, the occasional groan when a jab lands right in the liver, and the guys egging them on, always slightly hushed so as not to break the spell and now and then a rapturous cry because their fight is beautiful to see.”

There are always novellas on my shelves and on my TBR and in a week’s time, I’ll share the ones I’ve lined up with November in mind.

Do you remember the first novella you ever read?
Is there a novella in your stack right now?