When I think about novellas I’ve enjoyed this year, I recall Poulomi Sanyal’s Colour Me Confounded (2017) and Kerry Trautman’s Irregulars (2023), their settings soaked with the ambiance of their main characters’ workplaces, whether a boardroom or a diner.

And I think about Helen deWitt’s The English Understand Wool (2020), which was completely strange but engaging even so, and Heather Nolan’s How to Be Alone (2023) which contains two novellas that hinge on an interlude in the subway system beneath the city of Montreal, uniting characters’ actual journeys in the underground with their navigation of grief and loss.

Which ties perfectly with Chetna Maroo’s Western Lane (2023), the group read for last year’s #NovNov (also hosted by Rebecca and Cathy), which only just reached the top of my holds list. A largely interior story, it’s focussed on three sisters whose mother has died, and how they cope with her absence. Whether the judder of home-made gulab jamun on the counter or the knocking of the radiators on a cold night, every detail is precise and polished. Because readers remain solidly in the perspective of only one sister, the experience of the family’s grief is contained, but where she finds some relief in training on the squash courts daily, there’s no lasting respite for readers who can only witness her games (and she, herself, really only finds relief while playing too).

This year, Rebecca and Cathy have chosen Samantha Harvey’s Orbital (2023) for the group read which, ironically, arrived for pick-up with Western Lane, even though my holds were placed nearly a year apart (yes: a petty concern for sure, even more so when viewed from outer space). Harvey’s story is built on a foundation of craft mixed with compassion, so details like structuring and word selection are important, but the power of the story ultimately resides in her characters’ humanity and her authorial handling of matters of scale. Space-loving readers will appreciate the detail about pee, and lit-loving readers will enjoy the philosophical musings on love and loss. It was also shortlisted for this year’s Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction.

As was one of Nghi Vo’s novellas, Mammoths at the Gates (2023), but I read Into the Riverlands (2022), which opens with Chih in the barber’s chair, having their head shaved. The cleric’s job includes listening to how people respond to stories, so they’re attentive to the barber’s recounting of “The Cruel Wife of Master See” and readers are attentive to Chih’s role…because who wouldn’t want a job like theirs. Even if it does mean a shaved head (rubbed with jasmine oil, so there’s that). Soon enough, however, the stuff of stories erupts in a more pressing sense, and although I planned to read a little of this novella each day, I burst through it. Other books in The Singing Hills Cycle: The Empress of Salt and Fortune (2020), When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain (2020), and The Brides of High Hill (2024).

Another with storytelling at its heart is P. Djèli Clark’s The Black God’s Drums (2018): such a skinny book that I had overlooked it on my shelf, even after thoroughly enjoying his Ring Shout last year. It’s an alternate history set in nineteenth-century New Orleans, with a feisty street urchin who calls herself Creeper at the heart of it—but it’s the broader cast that makes this such a compelling tale. It opens in a suspenseful scene and that swell carried me straight through—like I was travelling on the airship that Ann-Marie captains. I hope someone has optioned this: I’d love to see these characters on-screen. It was truly a delight to fall into the story and find myself unwilling to set it aside until it was complete.

Complementing Clark’s story perfectly is the quiet, character-driven 1958 classic, January, by Argentinian writer Sara Gallardo (in English translation by Frances Riddle and Maureen Shaughnessy, via Archipelago in 2023). She was only twenty-seven when she wrote it, so it’s doubly impressive that it’s now assigned reading there. Even the briefest mention of this work often includes a summary sentence of this feminist classic, but here is a spoiler-free passage that demonstrates Gallardo’s sensibility and Nefer’s place in the world:

“Nefer doesn’t think Juan will ever learn to play [guitar] well, but she envies him all alone in his room, focused on his task. She’d like to be able to get away from her mother’s surliness, from Alcira’s indifference, and the radio—to escape from everything, lock herself away, close her eyes and think about Negro’s smile, his voice saying hello, how he hops on his horse, and how he dismounts to smoke a cigarette squinting his eyes, but instead she’s dejected by the room shrouded by rain.”

Nora Gold’s two novellas—In Sickness and In Health and Yom Kippur in a Gym (2024)—appear as a flipbook. Who doesn’t LOVE a flipbook. In Sickness depicts an insular view of a few days in a woman’s experience of a resurgence of her undiagnosed autoimmune disorder, which devours about one week in every month of her life. Amid her symptoms, in an unfocused and feverish state, she’s concerned. About her employer’s frustration with her unreliability, the burden of care-giving that falls to her husband so frequently and exhaustingly, and the vibrancy of her husband’s assistant who is thriving and ever-present. It’s an intimate and detailed narrative that immerses readers in an oft-overlooked situation. Gym is set in the Jewish Community Centre when everyone’s gathered to close out another year’s High Holydays and, in contrast, is a bustling scene of alternating voices (including the Rabbi and even the gym itself). Everyone is in their own head, and then one of them has a personal crisis. I started reading it at the beginning of November and stalled because it felt a little over-earnest but, after the American election was over, this is just the tone I craved and, oh, the resolution was so warmly satisfying that I wanted to crawl inside it and stay awhile. Gold is perhaps best known for her work at JewishFiction.net but these novellas offer a little more story to chew on.

This November has felt more…dense somehow. As though I am living it at half-speed AND double-speed simultaneously. I wrote most of this post in October, and left just enough space to include talk of Nora Gold’s book, but now it’s nearly December. Fortunately, Rebecca and Cathy have had plenty of more focussed participants in their annual event. If you’re looking to add to your Novella TBR, check out what others have been reading by following the links here.

Last night, I finished reading Munir Hachemi’s novella Living Things “punk-like blend of Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives and Samanta Schweblin’s Fever Dream” in translation by Julia Sanches, published in June by Coach House Books.

What novella are you reading, or have you read most recently?