A novella is a story that sits in the middle: longer than a short story, shorter than a full novel. There is no exact page number everyone agrees on, but you can often read one in an evening. Because it is shorter, a novella usually follows fewer people and one main problem; it does not have room for a novel’s many side plots. Writers and publishers use the word; in ordinary talk people more often say “a short novel” or just name the book. Though actually English borrowed it from Italian, and it is a close cousin of novel — two English words that came from the same older word by different roads.