25 Books You Can Finish in a Single Weekend — No Excuses

Eileen author Ottessa Moshfegh's McGlue (144 pages) takes place in 1851 Salem, MA, telling the story of a man who got too drunk to remember the night before, but thinks that he may have killed another man — that man being his best friend.

Written through a series of photos, diary extracts, and emails, Monica Sabolo's darkly funny All This Has Nothing to Do With Me (160 pages) follows an obsessive relationship from its onset, when journalist "MS" hires the moody, Vespa-riding hottie "XX" for a job at her magazine and finds herself quickly smitten.

Written by the legendary Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending (163 pages) revolves around a man who — when his childhood friends drop unexpectedly back into his life — finds himself confronted by the past he thought he had long left behind.

Beloved author Toni Morrison's Home (160 pages) tells the story of an embittered Korean War veteran who returns with his sister to the small Georgia town they both left behind, that he's hated all of his life, bringing up memories from both childhood and the war that he'd rather not revisit.

In Han Kang's Kafka-esque tale, The Vegetarian (192 pages), a woman plagued by dreams of blood and brutality decides to renounce meat, a seemingly innocuous dietary choice that spirals into a battle for power and control between Yeong-hye, her husband, and her whole family.

In Megan Hunter's debut novel, The End We Start From (160 pages), a woman gives birth to her first child just as London is submerged by a flood, forcing her and her baby to leave the city behind to search for a new home in their newly dangerous country.

Justin Torres's beautiful coming-of-age story, We the Animals (126 pages), follows three brothers — all of them half white, half Puerto Rican — as they make their way through their dysfunctional childhood and parents' tumultuous and wild love for each other, learning what it means to truly grow up.

In Terese Marie Mailhot's powerful memoir, Heart Berries (160 pages), she follows her own story from her insanely dysfunctional upbringing in the Pacific Northwest through her eventual hospitalization and diagnosis with post-traumatic stress disorder and bipolar II disorder.

Dept. of Speculation (192 pages) by Jenny Offill delivers a whirlwind portrait of a marriage in such a slim novel, following two young lovers from their dreams of all the thrilling uncertainties that lay ahead through the challenges of parenthood, career disappointments, and familiar marital strains.

In Samantha Schweblin's unsettling Fever Dream (192 pages), a young woman lies dying in a rural hospital clinic beside her neighbor's son, and together they slowly unravel and reveal a larger and more terrifying conspiracy than you would ever guess.

Claire-Louise Bennett's Pond (208 pages) is a complete original, eschewing the conventions of narrative to follow an unnamed young woman and the seemingly inconsequential details of her daily experience living alone on the outskirts of a small coastal village.

In Rachel Khong's Goodbye, Vitamin, a 30-year-old woman who has just broken off her engagement returns home to live with her parents, only to find that her history professor father is losing his memory and that her mom is losing her mind.

Taking place in 1918 Reykjavik during the outbreak of the Spanish flu, Sjón's Moonstone: The Boy Who Never Was (160 pages) follows a young boy who identifies as gay in a place where homosexuality is not just unacknowledged — it seemingly does not exist.

In Nora Ephron's hilarious Heartburn (179 pages), a cookbook author who is seven months pregnant discovers that her husband is in love with another woman, and she finds herself vacillating between wanting to win him back and wishing him dead while revisiting her favorite recipes.

In short story master Lorrie Moore's Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? (147 pages), a young woman reminisces on the Summer she and her best friend, Sils, spent working at an amusement park in upstate New York, when 15-year-old Sils found herself in trouble and Berie decided she would do anything in her power to help her.

Written by Atonement author Ian McEwan, Amsterdam (158 pages) follows two old friends who meet at a London crematorium to pay their last respects to Molly Lane — a woman whom they had both romanced — and make a pact that will have dire consequences for them both, as well as for another one of Molly's former lovers, a man who is favored to be the next prime minister.

In celebrated author Joyce Carol Oates's Rape: A Love Story (128 pages), a beautiful 30-something widow accompanied by her 12-year-old daughter is sexually assaulted by a group of men while returning from a Fourth of July party, and the consequences of that night follow both women forever.

In Anne Carson's wonderfully strange Autobiography of Red (149 pages), she follows the story of a winged red monster named Geryon as he falls in love with photography, as well as with a golden boy named Herakles who eventually breaks his heart.

In Edan Lepucki's super-short and hilarious If You're Not Yet Like Me (55 pages), an insecure young woman tells her unborn daughter the story of her unpromising relationship with a jobless dud named Zachary.

Taking place in prewar Indochina during the last days of colonialism, Marguerite Duras's The Lover (127 pages) revolves around a provocative 15-and-a-half-year-old French girl as she enters an erotic, passionate, and destructive love affair with an older Chinese man.

In Patrick Modiano's So You Don't Get Lost in the Neighborhood (160 pages), a solitary man in Paris find himself drawn by a shady gambler and a beautiful young woman into the mystery a decades-old murder, an investigation which forces him to revisit a long-buried trauma of his own.

Impossibly dense and impossible to neatly summarize, Jason Schwartz's John the Posthumous (148 pages) follows an unnamed narrator who has returned to his family home after some time away as he learns how maintain the rural property on his own (and as death, betrayal, and violence appear around every corner).

In Time's Arrow (168 pages), Martin Amis traces the life of a successful American doctor in reverse, starting with his death, traveling backwards through his years as an illegal immigrant and the horrors of his wartime service, and ending with his upbringing in a Germany destroyed by World War I.

Neil Gaiman's The Ocean at the End of the Lane (181 pages) follows a man as he returns home for a funeral, and although his childhood house is gone, he is still able to visit and reflect on the farm at the end of the road where, 40 years earlier, a remarkable girl named Lettie once saved his life.

Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart (181 pages) tells two stories of a Nigerian man named Okonkwo, reflecting on the cultural collision that occurred when imperial Christian English missionaries introduced their own way of life to the Ibos of Nigeria and how Okonkwo attempted to resist their efforts.