20 Sep 2018

Australian Reading Hour is today! This annual campaign encourages all Australians, of all ages, to pick up a book and read for one hour. In recognition of this wonderful initiative, we’ve compiled a list of short novels suitable for one-day reads.

All eight titles featured in this list were released this past year and you can find even more recommendations, including a number of classic works, by browsing this collection.

Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata (translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori)

Keiko has never really fitted in. At school and university people find her odd and her family worries she’ll never be normal. To appease them, Keiko takes a job at a newly opened convenience store. Here, she finds peace and purpose in the simple, daily tasks and routine interactions. But in Keiko’s social circle it just won’t do for an unmarried woman to spend all her time stacking shelves and re-ordering green tea. As pressure mounts, Keiko is forced to take desperate action.

West by Carys Davies

Addled by grief after the death of his wife, and prompted by reports of colossal animal bones found in Kentucky, John Cyrus Bellman sets off on his quest, leaving behind his only daughter, Bess, to be cared for by her aunt. While Bellman ventures farther into the wilderness, forging an uneasy fellowship with his guide, a Native American boy, Bess traces her father’s path on maps at the local library and keeps out of the way of their peculiar neighbour Elmer Jackson.

Trick by Domenico Starnone (translated by Jhumpa Lahiri)

Daniele Mallarico is a successful illustrator whose reputation is slowly fading. Mario is his four-year-old grandson. Daniele has lived for years in solitude, focusing obsessively on his work. Mario has been left by his querulous parents with his grandfather for a 72-hour stay. Shut inside a haunted apartment in Naples, grandfather and grandson match wits, while outside lurks Naples – a wily, violent, and passionate city whose influence is not easily shaken.

Pink Mountain on Locust Island by Jamie Marina Lau

Monk lives in Chinatown with her washed-up painter father. When Santa Coy-possible boyfriend, potential accomplice-enters their lives, an intoxicating hunger consumes their home. So begins a heady descent into art, casino resorts, drugs, vacant swimming pools, religion, pixelated tutorial videos, and senseless violence. This unpredictable and innovative Australian debut has recently been shortlisted for the 2018 Readings Prize for New Australian Fiction.

Crudo by Olivia Laing

From a Tuscan hotel for the super-rich to a Brexit-paralysed UK, Kathy spends the first summer of her 40s trying to adjust to making a lifelong commitment just as Trump is tweeting the world into nuclear war. Crudo charts in real time what it was like to live and love in the horrifying summer of 2017, from the perspective of a commitment-phobic peripatetic artist who may or may not be Kathy Acker…

Our Life in the Forest by Marie Darrieussecq (translated by Penny Hueston)

In the near future, a woman is writing in the depths of a forest. Her body is falling apart, as is the world around her. Before, in the city, she travelled fortnightly to visit her ‘half’, Marie, her spitting image, who lay in an induced coma, her body parts available whenever the woman needed them. This is a clever novel of suspense that challenges our ideas about the future, organ trafficking, cloning, identity, and the place of the individual in a surveillance state.

Chemistry by Weike Wang

Our unnamed narrator is three years into her post-grad studies in chemistry and nearly as long into her relationship with her devoted boyfriend, who has just proposed. But while his future seems straightforward, hers is feeling increasingly unstable unstable – her research is stagnating and the demands of her Chinese parents are crowding her thoughts. Eventually, the pressure mounts so high that she must leave everything she thought she knew about her future, and herself, behind.

The Incendiaries by R.O. Kwon

Phoebe Lin is a glamorous student at the prestigious Edwards University. She doesn’t tell anyone she blames herself for her mother’s recent death. Will Kendall is a misfit scholarship boy who transfers to Edwards from Bible college. Will loves Phoebe. Grieving and guiltridden, Phoebe is increasingly drawn into a secretive extremist cult connected to North Korea. When the group bombs several buildings in the name of faith, killing five people, Phoebe disappears.