What are the top book recommendations for 'wonderfully witty and short'?

Harry Potter has no idea how famous he is. That's because he's being raised by his miserable aunt and uncle who are terrified Harry will learn that he's really a wizard, just as his parents were. But everything changes when Harry is summoned to atten... Read more about Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone

Mr. and Mrs. Dursley, of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much. They were the last people you’d expect to be involved in anything strange or...

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Hazel Lancaster's mom thinks she's depressed. And Hazel agrees. But as far as the 16-year-old sees it, her depression is a mere side effect of dying from the stage IV cancer she's been battling for years.

Still, Hazel's worried parents believe that i... Read more about The Fault in Our Stars

Late in the winter of my seventeenth year, my mother decided I was depressed, presumably because I rarely left the house, spent quite a lot of time in bed, read the same book over and over, ate infreq...

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The extraordinary #1 New York Times bestseller hailed as one of the best books of all time, is now the basis for an HBO original series, starring Dafne Keen, Ruth Wilson, James McAvoy, and Lin-Manuel Miranda.

An Entertainment Weekly "All-Time Greates... Read more about The Golden Compass

Lyra and her dæmon moved through the darkening hall, taking care to keep to one side, out of sight of the kitchen. The three great tables that ran the length of the hall were laid already, the silver ...

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A magical island. A dangerous task. A burning secret.

Linus Baker leads a quiet, solitary life. At forty, he lives in a tiny house with a devious cat and his old records. As a Case Worker at the Department in Charge Of Magical Youth, he spends his da... Read more about The House in the Cerulean Sea

That was an understatement. He watched in rapt wonder as an eleven-year-old girl named Daisy levitated blocks of wood high above her head. The blocks spun in slow, concentric circles. Daisy frowned in...

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Published in 1997, Neil Gaiman's darkly hypnotic first novel, Neverwhere, heralded the arrival of a major talent and became a touchstone of urban fantasy.

It is the story of Richard Mayhew, a young London businessman with a good heart and an ordinar... Read more about Neverwhere

SHE HAD BEEN RUNNING for four days now, a harum-scarum tumbling flight through passages and tunnels. She was hungry, and exhausted, and more tired than a body could stand, and each successive door was...

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The pride of high-ranking Mr Darcy and the prejudice of middle-class Elizabeth Bennet conduct an absorbing dance through the rigid social hierarchies of early-nineteenth-century England, with the passion of the two unlikely lovers growing as their un... Read more about Pride and Prejudice

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife. However little known the feelings or views of such a man may be on his first enteri...

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Meet Thursday Next, literary detective without equal, fear or boyfriend

Jasper Fforde's beloved New York Times bestselling novel introduces literary detective Thursday Next and her alternate reality of literature-obsessed England-from the author of T... Read more about The Eyre Affair

‘. . . There are two schools of thought about the resilience of time. The first is that time is highly volatile, with every small event altering the possible outcome of the earth’s future. The other v...

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"Gabriel García Márquez meets Umberto Eco meets Jorge Luis Borges for a sprawling magic show."-The New York Times Book Review

"One gorgeous read." -Stephen King

A New York Times Bestseller

Barcelona, 1945: A city slowly heals in the aftermath of the ... Read more about The Shadow of the Wind

THERE ARE NO SECOND CHANCES IN LIFE, EXCEPT TO FEEL remorse. Julián Carax and I met in the autumn of 1933. At that time I was working for the publisher Toni Cabestany, who had discovered him in 1927 i...

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Selected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best novels of all time

Slaughterhouse-Five, an American classic, is one of the world's great antiwar books. Centering on the infamous World War II firebombing of Dresden, the novel is the result of w... Read more about Slaughterhouse-Five

All this happened, more or less. The war parts, anyway, are pretty much true. One guy I knew really was shot in Dresden for taking a teapot that wasn’t his. Another guy I knew really did threaten to h...

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From #1 New York Times bestselling author Brandon Sanderson, The Way of Kings, Book One of the Stormlight Archive begins an incredible new saga of epic proportion.

Roshar is a world of stone and storms. Uncanny tempests of incredible power sweep acro... Read more about The Way of Kings

“You’ve killed me. Bastards, you’ve killed me! While the sun is still hot, I die!” —Collected on the fifth day of the week Chach of the month Betab of the year 1171, ten seconds before death. Subject ...

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