Novellas in November 2026, Part 1

/ Whispering Gums

Last Novellas in November I wrote one post, November being, as we know, “that” month for litbloggers! Let’s see how I go this year. Before I get going I want to thank Cathy of 746 Books and Rebecca of Bookish Beck) for the work they put into it, because novellas feature highly in my most memorable books. So, I love this month.

These reading months tend to suggest you start with “my year in [whatever the topic is]”, so that is my focus for this post. Last year I had read 7, that is, four novellas, and four novella-length nonfiction. This year, which goes from 1 November 2025 to 31 October 2026, I’ve read 8, but mostly fiction. As last year I’m dividing them into two groups: Novellas, and Novella-length Nonfiction.

Novella

  • Johanna Bell, Department of the Vanishing (more than 200 pages but only 30K words) (my review): winner of Best Unpublished Work in 2025 Tasmanian Literary Awards
  • Merlinda Bobis, In the name of the trees (my review): winner of the 2026 ACT Literary Award for Fiction, and shortlisted for other awards
  • Angus Gaunt, Anna (my review): joint winner of the 2025 Finlay Lloyd 20/40 Prize
  • Samantha Harvey, Orbital (136pp.) (my review): won the 2024 Booker Prize, and shortlisted for other awards
  • Claire Keegan, Small things like these (116pp.) (my review): won the 2022 Orwell Prize for Political Fiction, and won or was shortlisted for other awards
  • Vicenzo Latronico, Perfection (150pp.) (my review): shortlisted for several awards
  • Angela O’Keeffe, Phantom days (168pp.) (my review)

Novella-length nonfiction

  • Kim Kelly, Touched (Memoir, 142pp.) (my review) : joint winner of the 2025 Finlay Lloyd 20/40 Prize

All of the above were published between 2024 and 2026, which, as I said last year, suggests that publishers are currently happy to publish shorter works. In fact, in a recent Secrets from the Green Room podcast with Melanie Cheng, whose novella The burrow I read last year, interviewer Irma Gold observed that publishers seem more interested in novellas at the moment. Is this for economic reasons? Or shorter attention spans? Or just a willingness to be less restrictive? Or?

One of the things I love about my novella reading is that this is where I more often get to branch out into non-Australian and translated writing. This year, three of my eight reads were by non-Australian writers, those being the English Samantha Harvey, the Irish Claire Keegan, and the Italian (and so translated) Vicenzo Latronico.

Novellas are also where we often come across writers experimenting with form, voice, or language, and my selection this year certainly delivered. My books include a one voiced by a book (Phantom Days), a bricolage novel (Department of the Vanishing), a rewrite of a previous novel (Perfection), a sort of plotless meditation over one day (Orbital), and a non-linear, multi-lingual story of history and trauma, place and displacement (In the name of the trees).

What does novella reading add to your reading experience?

Written for Novellas in November 2026.

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