The best short novels for screen-addled minds

Who honestly has the time or inclination to finish long novels these days? I yearn for a serene period when I can read The Red and the Black or The Raj Quartet each night before bedtime, but I seem to be imagining someone else’s life. When new content, cool and engaging, is flooded onto YouTube daily, when you have subscriptions to four different websites, and the telephone regularly pings (or rather, zhuzzes) with WhatsApp messages, entering the world of Julian Sorel or the British in India is a struggle. I used to read two or three books a week, very cheerfully, but since around 2016 we’ve lived in a world so swirling and volatile that literature has at times seemed like its shadow. Do most of us even have the stability of character or lifestyle any more to follow a long book to its end? The me of today might want to read Peter Ackroyd’s Dickens, but tomorrow’s version, I know, may feel very differently about it.