10 Short Books to Read Before You Die (Under 300 Pages)

Looking for books that are must read? Then here are the best book recommendations for books to read before you die list.

This list of 10 short books to read before you die includes best book are all under 300 pages. Whether you’re in the mood for short books to read in one sitting, or want to check include short books for your book club, these are great book suggestions.

You’ll find everything from best debut novels and feel good books to fast-paced thrillers. Best of all, many of these short reads are available on Kindle Unlimited and Audible, so you can start right away.

Also check out

10 Short Books to Read Before You Die

Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan

I am sure this will be an unforgettable historical fiction you’ll ever read. This is a beautifully written story set in a small Irish town in 1985. Bill Furlong, a coal merchant, discovers a secret at the local convent. This makes him face his past and question the choices of his community.

It is 1985 in a small Irish town. During the weeks leading up to Christmas, Bill Furlong, a coal merchant and family man faces into his busiest season. Early one morning, while delivering an order to the local convent, Bill makes a discovery which forces him to confront both his past and the complicit silences of a town controlled by the church.

Already an international bestseller, Small Things Like These is a deeply affecting story of hope, quiet heroism, and empathy from one of our most critically lauded and iconic writers.

BUY NOW ON AMAZON | LISTEN FREE ON AUDIBLE

Open Water by Caleb Azumah Nelson

Open Water is a tender love story about two Black British artists navigating their relationship and identities in London. You will love lyrical writing and the themes of love, race, and vulnerability.

Two young people meet at a pub in South East London. Both are Black British, both won scholarships to private schools where they struggled to belong, both are now artists — he a photographer, she a dancer — trying to make their mark in a city that by turns celebrates and rejects them. Tentatively, tenderly, they fall in love. But two people who seem destined to be together can still be torn apart by fear and violence.

At once an achingly beautiful love story and a potent insight into race and masculinity, Open Water asks what it means to be a person in a world that sees you only as a Black body, to be vulnerable when you are only respected for strength, to find safety in love, only to lose it. With gorgeous, soulful intensity, Caleb Azumah Nelson has written the most essential British debut of recent years.

BUY NOW ON AMAZON | LISTEN FREE ON AUDIBLE

Alone With You in the Ether by Olivie Blake

Alone With You in the Ether is a unique love story between two deeply flawed individuals. We have Aldo, a math-obsessed doctoral student, and Regan, a counterfeit artist with bipolar disorder.

Two people meet in the Art Institute by chance. Prior to their encounter, he is a doctoral student who manages his destructive thoughts with compulsive calculations about time travel; she is a bipolar counterfeit artist, undergoing court-ordered psychotherapy. By the end of the story, these things will still be true. But this is not a story about endings.

For Regan, people are predictable and tedious, including and perhaps especially herself. She copes with the dreariness of existence by living impulsively, imagining a new, alternate timeline being created in the wake of every rash decision.

To Aldo, the world feels disturbingly chaotic. He gets through his days by erecting a wall of routine: a backbeat of rules and formulas that keep him going. Without them, the entire framework of his existence would collapse.

For Regan and Aldo, life has been a matter of resigning themselves to the blueprints of inevitability—until the two meet. Could six conversations with a stranger be the variable that shakes up the entire simulation?

From Olivie Blake, the New York Times bestselling author of The Atlas Six, comes an intimate and contemporary study of time, space, and the nature of love. Alone with You in the Ether explores what it means to be unwell, and how to face the fractures of yourself and still love as if you’re not broken.

BUY NOW ON AMAZON | LISTEN FREE ON AUDIBLE | READ with Kindle Unlimited

We Were Liars by E. Lockhart

I’m a big fan of short thrillers you can read out in one sitting. This one, about a privileged family, a private island, and a group of friends with dark secrets, is seriously a good read.

A beautiful and distinguished family.

A private island.

A brilliant, damaged girl; a passionate, political boy.

A group of four friends—the Liars—whose friendship turns destructive.

A revolution. An accident. A secret.

Lies upon lies.

True love.

The truth.

We Were Liars is a modern, sophisticated suspense novel from New York Times bestselling author, National Book Award finalist, and Printz Award honoree E. Lockhart.

Read it.

And if anyone asks you how it ends, just LIE.

BUY NOW ON AMAZON | LISTEN FREE ON AUDIBLE

My Sister, the Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite

My Sister, the Serial Killer is dark and funny. We follow Korede, who helps her sister Ayoola clean up after her deadly self-defense kills. Things get complicated when Ayoola starts dating Korede’s crush. I feel like she is also one of those under-the-radar authors you need to read.

When Korede’s dinner is interrupted one night by a distress call from her sister, Ayoola, she knows what’s expected of her: bleach, rubber gloves, nerves of steel and a strong stomach. This’ll be the third boyfriend Ayoola’s dispatched in, quote, self-defence and the third mess that her lethal little sibling has left Korede to clear away. She should probably go to the police for the good of the menfolk of Nigeria, but she loves her sister and, as they say, family always comes first. Until, that is, Ayoola starts dating the doctor where Korede works as a nurse. Korede’s long been in love with him, and isn’t prepared to see him wind up with a knife in his back: but to save one would mean sacrificing the other…

My Sister, the Serial Killer is a blackly comic novel about how blood is thicker – and more difficult to get out of the carpet – than water.

BUY NOW ON AMAZON | LISTEN FREE ON AUDIBLE

Before the Coffee Gets Cold by toshikazu kawaguchi

Set in a tiny Tokyo café that allows time travel, Before the Coffee Gets Cold is about love, loss, and second chances. Each visitor to the café has a unique reason to revisit their past. This is such an immersive novel to read when you want to escape into a beautifully novel.

What would you change if you could go back in time?

In a small back alley in Tokyo, there is a café which has been serving carefully brewed coffee for more than one hundred years. But this coffee shop offers its customers a unique experience: the chance to travel back in time.

In Before the Coffee Gets Cold, we meet four visitors, each of whom is hoping to make use of the café’s time-travelling offer, in order to: confront the man who left them, receive a letter from their husband whose memory has been taken by early onset Alzheimer’s, to see their sister one last time, and to meet the daughter they never got the chance to know.

But the journey into the past does not come without risks: customers must sit in a particular seat, they cannot leave the café, and finally, they must return to the present before the coffee gets cold . . .

Toshikazu Kawaguchi’s beautiful, moving story explores the age-old question: what would you change if you could travel back in time? More importantly, who would you want to meet, maybe for one last time?

BUY NOW ON AMAZON | LISTEN FREE ON AUDIBLE | READ with Kindle Unlimited

All the Lovers in the Night by Mieko Kawakami

All the Lovers in the Night is about Fuyuko Irie who decides to change her life. As she tries to connect with others, old, painful memories come back. This is a touching story about being alone, making changes, and finding hope in dark times. You should definitely add this to books to read before you die list.

Fuyuko Irie is a freelance copy editor in her mid-thirties. Working and living alone in a city where it is not easy to form new relationships, she has little regular contact with anyone other than her editor, Hijiri, a woman of the same age but with a very different disposition. When Fuyuko stops one day on a Tokyo street and notices her reflection in a storefront window, what she sees is a drab, awkward, and spiritless woman who has lacked the strength to change her life and decides to do something about it.

As the long overdue change occurs, however, painful episodes from Fuyuko’s past surface and her behavior slips further and further beyond the pale. All the Lovers in the Night is acute and insightful, entertaining and engaging; it will make readers laugh, and it will make them cry, but it will also remind them, as only the best books do, that sometimes the pain is worth it.

BUY NOW ON AMAZON | LISTEN FREE ON AUDIBLE

Normal People by Sally Rooney

Normal People is about Connell and Marianne. They are opposites who share an intense but complicated relationship over several years. It’s about first love, class dynamics, and emotional connection.

At school Connell and Marianne pretend not to know each other. He’s popular and well-adjusted, star of the school soccer team while she is lonely, proud, and intensely private. But when Connell comes to pick his mother up from her housekeeping job at Marianne’s house, a strange and indelible connection grows between the two teenagers – one they are determined to conceal.

A year later, they’re both studying at Trinity College in Dublin. Marianne has found her feet in a new social world while Connell hangs at the sidelines, shy and uncertain. Throughout their years in college, Marianne and Connell circle one another, straying toward other people and possibilities but always magnetically, irresistibly drawn back together. Then, as she veers into self-destruction and he begins to search for meaning elsewhere, each must confront how far they are willing to go to save the other.

Sally Rooney brings her brilliant psychological acuity and perfectly spare prose to a story that explores the subtleties of class, the electricity of first love, and the complex entanglements of family and friendship

BUY NOW ON AMAZON | LISTEN FREE ON AUDIBLE

Nothing to See Here by Kevin Wilson

Nothing to See Here is about Lillian whose life takes a strange turn when she agrees to care for twins who literally burst into flames when upset. You will love this quirky and heartwarming book love, family, and finding your place. It was also one of the popular audiobooks I really loved.

Lillian and Madison were unlikely roommates and yet inseparable friends at their elite boarding school. But then Lillian had to leave the school unexpectedly in the wake of a scandal and they’ve barely spoken since. Until now, when Lillian gets a letter from Madison pleading for her help.

Madison’s twin stepkids are moving in with her family and she wants Lillian to be their caretaker. However, there’s a catch: the twins spontaneously combust when they get agitated, flames igniting from their skin in a startling but beautiful way. Lillian is convinced Madison is pulling her leg, but it’s the truth.

Thinking of her dead-end life at home, the life that has consistently disappointed her, Lillian figures she has nothing to lose. Over the course of one humid, demanding summer, Lillian and the twins learn to trust each other—and stay cool—while also staying out of the way of Madison’s buttoned-up politician husband. Surprised by her own ingenuity yet unused to the intense feelings of protectiveness she feels for them, Lillian ultimately begins to accept that she needs these strange children as much as they need her—urgently and fiercely. Couldn’t this be the start of the amazing life she’d always hoped for?

BUY NOW ON AMAZON | LISTEN FREE ON AUDIBLE | READ with Kindle Unlimited

Out East by John Glynn

Out East captures the transformative summer the author spent in a Montauk share house. It’s about friendship and first love. I feel the writing is intimate and nostalgic. It’s also one of the best narrated books.

A gripping portrait of life in a Montauk summer house–a debut memoir of first love, identity and self-discovery among a group of friends who became family.

They call Montauk the end of the world, a spit of land jutting into the Atlantic. The house was a ramshackle split-level set on a hill, and each summer thirty one people would sleep between its thin walls and shag carpets. Against the moonlight the house’s octagonal roof resembled a bee’s nest. It was dubbed The Hive.

In 2013, John Glynn joined the share house. Packing his duffel for that first Memorial Day Weekend, he prayed for clarity. At 27, he was crippled by an all-encompassing loneliness, a feeling he had carried in his heart for as long as he could remember. John didn’t understand the loneliness. He just knew it was there. Like the moon gone dark.

OUT EAST is the portrait of a summer, of the Hive and the people who lived in it, and John’s own reckoning with a half-formed sense of self. From Memorial Day to Labor Day, The Hive was a center of gravity, a port of call, a home. Friendships, conflicts, secrets and epiphanies blossomed within this tightly woven friend group and came to define how they would live out the rest of their twenties and beyond.

BUY NOW ON AMAZON | LISTEN FREE ON AUDIBLE

The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry by Gabrielle Zevin

The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry follows a grumpy bookstore owner’s life changes when a mysterious package arrives at his shop. This is a heartwarming story about second chances, love, and the power of books. A charming read that’ll make you smile. I am sure this would be great uplifting book club book.

On the faded Island Books sign hanging over the porch of the Victorian cottage is the motto “No Man Is an Island; Every Book Is a World.” A. J. Fikry, the irascible owner, is about to discover just what that truly means.

A. J. Fikry’s life is not at all what he expected it to be. His wife has died, his bookstore is experiencing the worst sales in its history, and now his prized possession, a rare collection of Poe poems, has been stolen. Slowly but surely, he is isolating himself from all the people of Alice Island—from Lambiase, the well-intentioned police officer who’s always felt kindly toward Fikry; from Ismay, his sister-in-law who is hell-bent on saving him from his dreary self; from Amelia, the lovely and idealistic (if eccentric) Knightley Press sales rep who keeps on taking the ferry over to Alice Island, refusing to be deterred by A.J.’s bad attitude. Even the books in his store have stopped holding pleasure for him. These days, A.J. can only see them as a sign of a world that is changing too rapidly.

And then a mysterious package appears at the bookstore. It’s a small package, but large in weight. It’s that unexpected arrival that gives A. J. Fikry the opportunity to make his life over, the ability to see everything anew. It doesn’t take long for the locals to notice the change overcoming A.J.; or for that determined sales rep, Amelia, to see her curmudgeonly client in a new light; or for the wisdom of all those books to become again the lifeblood of A.J.’s world; or for everything to twist again into a version of his life that he didn’t see coming. As surprising as it is moving, The Storied Life of A. J. Fikry is an unforgettable tale of transformation and second chances, an irresistible affirmation of why we read, and why we love.

BUY NOW ON AMAZON | LISTEN FREE ON AUDIBLE

More Books To Read

28 Hottest Cowboy Romance Novels

32 Incredible Short Books (Under 100 Pages) That You Can Read in One Sitting

Best Short Books You Can Read In One Sitting

Love a Good Thriller? Check out 5 Must-Read Nominees from the Goodreads Choice Awards

17 Unforgettable Thriller Books I have Read As A Book Blogger

17 Engaging Thriller Audiobooks to Take Your Mind Off