Top Five Saturday: Books Under 300 Pages

I’ll kick off with this one: I only read it last week, so it is obviously upper front in my mind, and (unlike the others in this list) significantly beneath the 300 pages.

And it is an extraordinary inversion of Moby Dick: written from the whales’ perspective as, armed with harpoons and in fleets, they hunt men and in particular the mythic Toby Wick.

It is exceptional and powerful, with a gut wrenching twist, and the potency of a modern day parable married to an epic ballad.

Ness was always going to feature on this list and my first thought was A Monster Calls, but this is even more unsettling and disturbing than that.

And Never Let Me Go is equally disturbing and appalling. Ishiguro’s dystopian novel explores a range of ethical and moral questions raised by cloning, genetics and parenthood.

The edenic, priveleged Hailsham School raises and educates girls and boys like any other boarding school. But it harbours a dark secret – or perhaps it is more accurate to say it is complicit in society’s dark secret.

The revelation of that truth is a wonderful and appalling moment for the reader which I have no desire to spoil.

A strange and compelling novel, following the relationship between Marianne (intelligent, privileged, socially awkward) and Connell (intelligent, working class, popular) from their final year at school and through University and into Europe.

And their relationship is turbulent, (very) sexual, awkward, co-dependent, loyal… complicated. Very complicated. On the borderline of what you might find healthy and unhealthy.

The novel is wonderfully taut in its structure, vivid in the voices of the characters and nuanced. A beautiful and disturbing novel. Very Irish in its mixture of darkness and humour, tragedy and comedy.

This novel was recommended to me by students at my school – one of the very real privileges and pleasures of my job.

The story of Charlie, teetering on the brink of adulthood – and the edge of an emotional precipice.

His voice comes across so personally and intimately in the letters that form the novel – a vulnerable, complicated, wise, naive young man who gradually uncovers a buried traumatic memory that he had not yet been able to process.

It bears echoes of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time in their narrators but this novel is much more vivid and more authentic.

Another Young Adult novel with powerful adult themes and ideas – about identity, parenthood, family and abuse, about complacency and wilful blindness… wrapped up with Pet, a fantastical monstrous creature summoned through art and paint and blood to hunt the real monsters who don’t look like monsters.

Emezi’s prose is wonderful and vivid and urgent. They manage to hover somewhere between the literal and the parable – and some gorgeously sensory and unsettling descriptions.

Jam, the transgender female protagonist, whose blood summons Pet, is a wonderful creation full of courage and loyalty and sensitivity.