Novellas: “all killer, no filler”
~Joe Hill
It’s hard to believe, we are getting ready for the FIFTH year of Novellas in November, the month-long blogger/social media challenge celebrating the art of the short book, hosted by myself and Rebecca of Bookish Beck between 1 and 30 November.
A novella is usually classed as a book of between 20,000 to 40,000 words, but we tend to say anything under 200 pages (even nonfiction).
We are keeping things simple this year with one Buddy Read for the month. Our choice is Orbital by Samantha Harvey, which has just been shortlisted for the Booker Prize and is a stunning book about six astronauts on board a space station orbiting earth.
We won’t have any official themes or prompts, but you might want to start off the month with a My Year in Novellas retrospective looking at any novellas you have read since last NovNov, and finish it with a New to My TBR list based on what novellas others have tempted you to try in the future.
It’s always a busy month in the blogging world, what with Nonfiction November, German Literature Month, Margaret Atwood Reading Month and SciFi Month. Why not search your shelves and/or local library for novellas that could count towards multiple challenges?
From 1 November there will be a pinned post on Rebecca’s site from which you can join the link-up. Keep in touch via Twitter (@bookishbeck / @cathy746books) and Instagram (@bookishbeck / @cathy_746books), and feel free to use the feature images Cathy has alongside our new hashtag, #NovNov24.
You can also check out Rebecca’s post about a recent event she attended called The Future of the Novella during which Indie publisher Weatherglass Books and judge Ali Smith introduced the two winners of the inaugural Weatherglass Novella Prize: Kate Kruimink’s Astraea (set on a 19th-century Australian convict ship), out now, and Deborah Tomkins’ Aerth (a sci-fi novella in flash set on alternative earths), coming out in January. Both Rebecca and myself hope to read and review the novellas during November.