The long and short of it

Erica Wagner looks at why podcasts are now so lengthy, while novels are becoming so brief

Orbital is the second-shortest book to win the Booker in the prize's history, running to four pages longer than Offshore by Penelope Fitzgerald, which won in 1979

‘The sky is as bright as a polished shoe,’ the tale begins. Elya, Ziv and Kiva are three lads from Mezritsh, a town in Poland where ‘the sky is often dark with fumes from the tanneries, smoke, ash, cinders, wood shavings, winged insects, small birds, flying cats, prayers, curses and avenging visions of Adoshem.’ Elya, Kiva and Ziv are boys with ambition, determined to sell their case of well-made bristle brushes in the great market town of Lublin, just 100 kilometres walk away. What could go wrong? Well, it’s 1907, and in this corner of the Russian Empire there might Cossacks, on the road, or dogs, or — Suffice to say, history hovers in the distance, causing the reader of Manya Wilkinson’s remarkable second novel to consider what awaits them and their families as the 20^th century marches forward.

Yet Lublin — which just won the 2025 Wingate Prize of which, spoiler alert, I was chair of the judges — is funny, philosophical, profound. One critic described it as ‘like waiting for Godot, only with pogroms’ which cuts nicely to its bleak hilarity. It is also short. 150 pages, or thereabouts; an afternoon’s read. Equally crisp is the winner of last year’s Booker, Samantha Harvey’s Orbital, coming in at under 140 pages, a bantamweight book. Lublin is the length of a journey on foot; Orbital takes place across a single day in the life of four astronauts (from England, the United States, Italy and Japan) and two Russian cosmonauts as they orbit the earth: each of the day’s 16 orbits is a chapter.

I’m beginning to think this is a short-book moment: but it would be lazy to say that’s because our attention spans are so diminished by our phones/the internet/the barrage of terrible news about absolutely everything that we can only cope with volumes under 200 pages. Lazy and disrespectful: because it implies there’s something simple or easy to swallow about a book you can — if you choose — read in a few hours. But think about it: another volume with a buzz is Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico, translated from the Italian by Sophie Hughes — thick with detail despite its slenderness, it brings a beady eye to a Millennial couple’s existence in Berlin, itemising their possessions with a forensic sensibility that calls up — if we’re all being honest, and why not — the horror of recognition.

This is not an argument in favour of short novels over long ones. But it can be too easy to simply equate weight and heft with meaning. There are long novels that have the feel of shorter novels in what I would call a weirdly concentrated intensity: Moby-Dick fits this bill, as does Lucy Ellmann’s Ducks, Newburyport. Hundreds of pages on the wild poetry of the sea, isolation, cetology, vengeance; or hundred of pages written as a single sentence, one middle-aged Ohioan’s experience spilled into the reader's consciousness. These extraordinary novels are, to my mind, books of depth, not breath, which gives them their extraordinary focus.