#TopTenTuesday Small Things Like These: 10 Quick Reads #TuesdayBookBlog

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly meme created by The Broke and the Bookish and now hosted by Jana at That Artsy Reader Girl.

The rules are simple:

• Each Tuesday, Jana assigns a new topic. Create your own Top Ten list that fits that topic – putting your unique spin on it if you want.
• Everyone is welcome to join but please link back to That Artsy Reader Girl in your own Top Ten Tuesday post.
• Add your name to the Linky widget on that day’s post so that everyone can check out other bloggers’ lists.
• Or if you don’t have a blog, just post your answers as a comment.

This week’s topic is Top Ten Quick Reads, defined as books that are 150 pages or less. Here are ten short books that you could polish off in a day – or an afternoon/evening, depending on how fast you read. Links from the title will take you to my review.

1. Together by Luke Adam Hawker (64 pages) – a gentle and philosophical look at the events of 2020, the year of lockdown, through the eyes of a man and his dog
2. Joan Smokes by Angela Meyer (76 pages) – packs a powerful emotional punch with its haunting story of rejection, loss and trying to start over
3. El Hacho by Luis Carrasco (82 pages) – a timeless evocation of inheritance, duty and our relationship to the landscape that defines us
4. Christmas at Ladywell by Nicola Slade (97 pages) – having refurbished her inherited house, Freya has to transform her tiny stone barn into a romantic hideaway for a mystery guest 
5. A Stranger from the Storm by William Burton McCormick (110 pages) – who is the mysterious figure haunting the catacombs below the streets of Odessa?
6. A Devil Comes to Town by Paolo Maurensig, translated by Anne Milano Appel (118 pages) – when the devil turns up in a black car claiming to be a hot-shot publisher, unsatisfied authorial desires are unleashed and the village’s former harmony is shattered
7. Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan (128 pages) – as Bill Furlong, coal and timber merchant, does his rounds, he feels the past rising up to meet him and encounters the complicit silences of a people controlled by the Church
8. The Uncommon Reader by Alan Bennett (128 pages) – had the dogs not taken exception to the strange van parked in the royal grounds, the Queen might never have learnt of the Westminster travelling library’s weekly visits to the palace
9. Welcome to America by Linda Boström Knausgård, translated by Martin Aitken (128 pages) – a dark and scintillating portrait of a sensitive, strong-willed child and a young mind in the throes of trauma, a family on the brink of implosion, and the love that threatens to tear them apart
10. The Former Chief Executive by Kate Vane (150 pages) – a taut psychological study of grief, secrets and trying to leave behind your past

What quick reads can you recommend?