The inspiring novels that have left a significant mark on the world of
literature and popular culture.
Before the novel, the world of books was dominated by scientific tomes,
religious tracts and histories of the victorious in war. There had been
stories and epic poems from ancient times - Homer's Iliad and
Odyssey recounted ancient Greece, and Sir Gawain and the Green
Knight was a chivalric romance in Middle English, but it was not until
the seventeenth century, when the European middle classes had money and
leisure, that anything so frivolous as a novel could be sold for
entertainment.
Colin Salter traces the evolution of the novel from the earliest
examples through to the postmodernist best-sellers of the 21st century.
Rather than dwelling too long on the technical nuances of innovative
writing style he has amassed 100 of the greatest novel writers and
chosen their most significant work.
For writers such as Herman Melville, James Joyce or Harper Lee the
decision is not a difficult one. For Charles Dickens, Salman Rushdie and
Margaret Atwood, the choice is perhaps more difficult.
Following the style set with previous books in the 100 series, most
notably 100 Children's Books and 100 Science Discoveries, each
author is given a concise biography and their major novel analysed and
then set in context with their other published work.
Readers can become ridiculously well-read in 224 pages.
Authors included: Alexandre Dumas, Daniel Defoe, Victor Hugo, Mary
Shelly, Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë,
Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Hilary Mantel, Jane Austen, Robert Louis
Stevenson, Walter Scott, Lewis Carroll, JRR Tolkien, Gustave Flaubert,
Marcel Proust, Henry James, Harper Lee, James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway,
Margaret Atwood, Alice Walker, Jules Verne, HG Wells, Virginia Woolf,
Leo Tolstoy, Louisa M. Alcott, Arthur Conan Doyle, Bram Stoker, John
Steinbeck, CS Lewis, Chinua Achebe, Jack Kerouac, John Le Carre,
Arundhati Roy, Mila Kundera, Joseph Heller, JD Salinger, Alexandr
Solzhenitsyn, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Miguel Cervantes, Graham Greene, F.
Scott Fitzgerald, George Orwell, John Steinbeck, Evelyn Waugh, Robert
Graves, Daphne du Maurier, Agatha Christie, PG Wodehouse, Raymond
Chandler, Hunter S. Thompson, Khaled Hosseini.
