How Novels Work

Drawing on his popular weekly column in The Guardian, John Mullan sets out to answer these questions, opening our eyes to the writer's craft, and helping us to appreciate and enjoy novels more fully. Prize-winners and reading group favourites of recent years are set alongside the classics: Monica Ali, Nick Hornby, Jonathan Safran Foer, and Zadie Smith rub shoulders with Samuel Richardson and Laurence Sterne, Jane Austen and the Brontes, Raymond Chandler, and Virginia Woolf. Through pointed comparisons of their designs and devices, Mullan makes visible the techniques and effects of which we are often only half aware as we read. How Novels Work makes literary criticism something that all fiction enthusiasts can do. Book jacket.

John Mullan is Professor of English at University College London. He is the author of Sentiment and Sociability: The Language of Feeling in the Eighteenth Century (OUP) and co-editor of Eighteenth-Century Popular Culture: An Anthology (OUP). A broadcaster and journalist as well as an academic, he writes a weekly column on contemporary fiction for the Guardian.