Lately, audiobooks seem to have completely replaced my Spotify playlists when I’m out and about (and just in general, once a story has hooked me, if I’m being honest). Because I’ve been in a kind of sampling mood and want to spread my reading over multiple authors, I’ve been gravitating towards novella audiobooks.
Like short stories, novellas can be excellent for getting to know an author before diving into a full-length novel—but they are, of course, even more than that. The ones below, for instance, balance fairy tale nostalgia with brutality; coziness with mythology; and magic with alternate histories. They will drop you into fully realized worlds, if only for 100 pages or so, and leave you still thinking about them once they’ve ended.
Into the Riverlands by Nghi Vo
This is the third in a stunning novella series that has won all manner of awards, but you don’t have to start with the first one. Into the Riverlands follows the wandering cleric Chih of the Singing Hills, and their talking bird companion, Almost Brilliant, as they travel and collect stories. This time, they’ve come across two vastly different women traveling together, and an older couple who have more going on than they seem.
There is something about Nghi Vo’s novella series that is oddly comforting, even when it is ghoulish (as is the case with this third entry). In just 100 pages, Vo manages to create an Asian mythology-inspired world with myths and legends that feel like they expand off the page.
The Butcher of the Forest by Premee Mohamed
Nebula Award-winning Mohamed’s novella is a fantastical horror tale of missing children and wrathful tyrants. The wild forest Elmever is so formidable, even the tyrannical ruler of the land just outside of it fears it. That’s why, when his children go missing in the forest, he commands Veris Thorn to retrieve them. She’s the only person to have ever rescued a child from the forest, and if she doesn’t repeat her former success, the tyrant will kill her if the forest doesn’t first. With The Butcher of the Forest, Mohamed has engineered a story that is as much of a tearjerker as it is an ode to classic Western fairy tales.
A Dead Djinn in Cairo by P. Djèlí Clark
Technically, at 43 pages, this is a novellette, but it’s also an excellent introduction to Clark’s full-length novel A Master of Djinn, and its glittering steampunk world of 1912 Cairo. So I guess I split the difference. Here, we follow Special Investigator Fatma el-Sha’arawi as she navigates clockwork angels, djinn engineering, ghouls, and more, all for the sake of the suicide case she’s investigating.
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