Short and Sweet

Janet Tay in today's Starmag writes about novellas - Little Books, Big Punches she calls them.

She strongly recommends to local readers (as I strongly endorse!) :

• The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka (1915) (read online here)
  
• Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck (1937) (read online here)
  
• The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway (1952)
• Breakfast at Tiffany’s by Truman Capote (1958)

and reviews each of them. (In the print version of the newspaper, there is a 30% voucher for each of these titles from Kinokuniya.)

Two recent novellas I would add are Ian McEwan's On Chesil Beach, and Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist, both shortlisted recently for the Booker prize.

I last wrote about novellas here and really do think they are a great way in to serious fiction for the reader who may be put off by the length of a full-length novel.