Short Books for Short Winter Days

These novellas and short novels are the perfect companions for winter's short days ❄️🌅

Updated December 9, 2025
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The premonition : a novel
Yoshimoto, Banana 1964-
Paper Book
Longlisted for the PEN Translation Prize The internationally beloved author of Kitchen and Dead-End Memories returns with a beautiful and heartfelt story of a young woman haunted by her childhood and the inescapable bitterness that inevitably comes from knowing the...
The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World
Kimmerer, Robin Wall
Paper Book
An Instant New York Times Bestseller From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Braiding Sweetgrass, a bold and inspiring vision for how to orient our lives around gratitude, reciprocity, and community, based on the lessons of the natural world....
Infinite country : a novel
Engel, Patricia
Paper Book
"Remarkable...this is as much an all-American story as it is a global one." --Booklist (starred review) For readers of Valeria Luiselli and Edwidge Danticat, an urgent and lyrical novel about a Colombian family fractured by deportation, offering an intimate...
The stranger in the woods : the extraordinary story of the last true hermit
Finkel, Michael
Paper Book
Many people dream of escaping modern life, but most will never act on it. This is the remarkable true story of a man who lived alone in the woods of Maine for 27 years, making this dream a reality--not out of anger at the world, but simply because he preferred to live on his...
An artist of the floating world
Ishiguro, Kazuo 1954-
Paper Book
From the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature and author of the Booker Prize-winning novel The Remains of the Day   In the face of the misery in his homeland, the artist Masuji Ono was unwilling to devote his art solely to the celebration of physical...
Wild girls : how the outdoors shaped the women who challenged a nation
Miles, Tiya 1970-
Paper Book
Harriet Tubman, forced to labor outdoors on a Maryland plantation, learned from the land a terrain for escape. Louisa May Alcott ran wild, eluding gendered expectations in New England. The Indigenous women's basketball team from Fort Shaw, Montana, recaptured a sense of pride in physical prowess...
All systems red
Wells, Martha
Paper Book
Winner of the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus Award for Best Novella Winner of the Alex Award A New York Times and USA Today Bestseller Now an Apple Original series from Academy Award nominees Paul Weitz and Chris Weitz and starring Emmy...
An elderly lady is up to no good
Tursten, Helene 1954-
Paper Book
Maud is an irascible 88-year-old Swedish woman with no family, no friends, and... no qualms about a little murder. This funny, irreverent story collection by Helene Tursten, author of the Irene Huss investigations, features two-never-before translated stories that will keep you laughing all the way...
Thornhedge
Kingfisher, T.
Paper Book
Winner of the Hugo Award for Best Novella! From New York Times bestselling author T. Kingfisher, Thornhedge is the tale of a kind-hearted, toad-shaped heroine, a gentle knight, and a mission gone completely sideways. *The very special...
Things fall apart
Achebe, Chinua
Paper Book
"A true classic of world literature . . . A masterpiece that has inspired generations of writers in Nigeria, across Africa, and around the world." --Barack Obama "African literature is incomplete and unthinkable without the works of Chinua Achebe." --Toni Morrison "A...
The bookshop
Fitzgerald, Penelope.
Paper Book
National Book Critics Circle Award-winning author Penelope Fitzgerald's The Bookshop is "a marvelously piercing fiction" (Times Literary Supplement), short-listed for the Booker Prize. With an Introduction by David Nicholls, international best-selling author of One Day.
Orbital : a novel /
Harvey, Samantha,
Paper Book
WINNER OF THE BOOKER PRIZE 2024 * A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER **New York Times Book Review Book Club Pick** **Stephen Colbert's The Late Show Book Club Pick** Winner of the 2024 Hawthornden Prize Shortlisted for the 2024...
The Swimmers
Otsuka, Julie 1962-
Paper Book
NATIONAL BESTSELLER * CARNEGIE MEDAL FOR EXCELLENCE WINNER * From the award-winning author of The Buddha in the Attic and When the Emperor Was Divine comes a novel that "starts as a catalogue of spoken and unspoken rules for swimmers at an aquatic center but unfolds into a powerful...

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