20 shorter reads for teenagers

Author Anthony McGowan recommends some favourite books that aren’t intimidatingly long. 

I’ll never forget the satisfaction you feel as a young reader when you reach the last sentence in a book, and then it’s over, and there comes that little moment of silence as the story resonates with you, and you know that in some way you’re a better person for having achieved this, for having the book inside you.  

For many young readers, beset by the bewildering noise of modern life, and the perpetual pull of the online world, reading has become an activity increasingly crammed into the corner, and that simple pleasure in finishing ever more elusive.

So it might feel impossible to tackle some great monster of a book: a Moby Dick, a Middlemarch, perhaps even a Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. And that’s where the shorter book comes in: one which will, ideally, give a real taste of the transformative potential of literature in a more manageable package.  

There is, of course, an issue of definition. What counts as a short book? When does a short story become a novella? When does a novella become a novel? When does a novel become a doorstop?  

When I began to ponder short books for this piece, I initially thought about page numbers, the physical size and heft of the book. So I went through my bookshelves looking for something suitably slender. But then I realised that sheer bulk isn’t always the best measure of brevity.

One of the surprisingly wonderful recent trends in children’s publishing has been the rise of stories told in verse, where plenty of attractive white space means that a book that appears to have intimidating heft has a manageable word count.   

Let’s begin with a trilogy of classics, each of which I read as a teenager and took up permanent lodging in my head. I still recall the power of Animal Farm, George Orwell’s brilliant and tragic fable about the hope of change, and the betrayal of those hopes, and the lurch into totalitarianism. It’s a book that will never lose its relevance, but which also works on the simple level of a gripping narrative about exploited animals overcoming their masters.  

John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men has a similarly tragic trajectory, though of course the at times problematic language means that teachers/parents might need to offer some support to young readers. The bond of love between George and Lennie was somewhere in the back of my mind when I wrote about Nicky and Kenny in my Truth of Things sequence.  

Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea is, to this day, a compelling tale of adventure and struggle, as the titular fisherman attempts to catch and then, beset by ravening sharks, bring back to his village a huge marlin. Here the tragedy (the sharks eat the marlin) is perfectly balanced by the hope and resilience of ordinary folk engaged in extraordinary action. 

Still in the world of classics, I want to mention Tanya Landman’s retellings of Great Expectations, Pride and Prejudice, Frankenstein and Wuthering Heights, each a marvel of condensed brilliance. Wuthering Heights is my favourite novel, and I was sceptical that anyone could trim it to a fifth of its length without destroying it, but Landman pulls off the impossible. 

Moving on to contemporary works of compressed storytelling, Phil Earle’s Northern Soul put a smile on my face from the first page to the last. It’s wonderful on the horrors and glory of teen romance. 

Most of David Almond’s books are a little too long to sneak onto this list, but The Savage, illustrated by Dave McKean, comes in at just 78 pages, and those pages are filled with grief, madness and redemption. It’s a magnificent work of literary and visual art.  

Even more moving is Once by Morris Gleitzman. In general, I’m resistant to Holocaust lit, as it seems somehow wrong to turn the greatest horror in human history into any kind of entertainment, however well-intentioned. But Gleitzman’s story overcame that resistance with its simple, devastating storytelling. Little Felix broke my heart.  

And having said that I’m uncertain about Holocaust fiction, I’d balance Once with After the War, Tom Palmer’s ultimately uplifting tale of children surviving the concentration camps and finding healing in the Lake District. In fact, all of Palmer’s many novels, whether dealing with sporting or wartime heroics, show just how much a skilful author can do in a hundred or so pages.  

As gripping as they’re gritty, all of Patrice Lawrence’s novels have the unmistakable smack of truth. Orangeboy is one of my favourite YA titles of the last decade but too long for this list. Not so Needle, which compresses so much drama into its 128 pages: the injustices of the criminal system, the rage in the heart of those grieving, the traumas and challenges of being in care – it’s all there. 

The realism of Keith Gray’s brilliant Ostrich Boys had a huge influence on my writing for teenagers, and although that’s a full-length novel, he has employed the same urgency and truthfulness in his shorter works. A big favourite is The Climbers, which vividly conveys the thrills of, well, climbing (trees, that is). 

Katya Balen is another stunningly good writer who has carried the intense poetic vision of her longer novels into her shorter work. Foxlight and Birdsong are both very nearly perfect evocations of the natural world, relatively few words carrying so much beauty and resonance. 

And just time to mention some of those verse novels … The greatest of these is, I think, the extraordinarily moving One by Sarah Crossan, one of those books that you will simply never forget. But at about 28,000 words, its length takes it a little out of our short books range. The Weight of Water is only half that length, but this affecting meditation on displacement, swimming, and first love punches above its slender weight.  

Malorie Blackman’s Cloud Busting was one of the first YA verse novels and is as graceful and hard-hitting as you’d expect from this magnificent writer, and I know of few better depictions of the endearing awkwardness of adolescent male friendship.   

And let’s wind up with a couple more recent stories in verse. The Poet X by Elizabeth Acevedo, which centres on the family trials and romantic traumas of a Dominican teenager living in Harlem, is 368 pages but can be read in a couple of ecstatic hours.

Finally, Kwame Alexander’s two wonderful verse novels about a young basketball player, The Crossover and its prequel, Rebound, perfectly capture the challenges of adolescence and the exhilaration of sport, in verse that is by turns punchy and exquisite.  

All these books remind that us that fine things can come in small packages. The connoisseur admires not the weight of the diamond, but its perfection.  

The Beck by Anthony McGowan is available now.