A look at 100 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.
