A short-haul flight is one of the few places left where your phone can't compete for attention. No wifi, no signal, no infinite scroll – just you and whatever you packed. A travel writer at Condé Nast Traveller UK has turned that into a case for the under-160-page book: titles short enough to start at the gate and finish before the wheels touch down, all slim enough to slip into hand luggage.
The list leans on novellas and memoirs, and it's a genuinely useful mix. Sayaka Murata's Convenience Store Woman (163 pages, sneaked in on merit) follows Keiko, a woman who finds genuine purpose working in a Tokyo convenience store while her family pushes her towards marriage and a 'proper' career. Natasha Brown's Universality, longlisted for the 2025 Booker Prize, packs a media-and-class mystery into 156 pages – a gold-bar killing at a Yorkshire anarchist commune, and the viral exposé that unravels it.
For something more emotional, Anthony Shapland's A Room Above a Shop is the one the writer admits reading through tears on a 6.30am flight to Vienna. Set during the AIDS epidemic and Section 28, it follows two men – known only as M and B – building a secret life together in the room above their South Wales shop. Vincenzo Latronico's Perfection takes aim at millennial creative life in Berlin, tracking a picture-perfect couple as work, friendships and politics slowly curdle.
The shorter entries are striking too. Annie Ernaux's Simple Passion runs under 50 pages and dissects an obsessive two-year affair with a married man, blurring memoir and fiction. Vivian Gornick's The Odd Woman & The City chronicles decades of New York life and hard-won independence, and Toni Morrison's Recitatif – her only novella – trails Twyla and Roberta from a girls' shelter through decades of chance reunions, keeping readers guessing about which woman is which race.
Why it matters: long-haul and short-haul alike, reading beats a half-downloaded podcast queue. A novella fits the average European flight almost exactly, and finishing a whole book mid-air delivers a small satisfaction that three hours of ambient noise never will. It's a low-effort upgrade to any trip – pick one of these up before you fly and you'll land having actually achieved something.
Story via Condé Nast Traveller UK.
