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A novel is a relatively long work of narrative fiction, typically written in prose and published as a book. The present English word for a long work of prose fiction derives from the Italian: novella for "new", "news", or "short story of something new", itself from the Latin: novella, a singular noun use of the neuter plural of novellus, diminutive of novus, meaning "new". Some novelists, including Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Ann Radcliffe, John Cowper Powys, preferred the term "romance" to describe their novels.

According to Margaret Doody, the novel has "a continuous and comprehensive history of about two thousand years", with its origins in the Ancient Greek and Roman novel, in Chivalric romance, and in the tradition of the Italian Renaissance novella. The ancient romance form was revived by Romanticism, especially the historical romances of Walter Scott and the Gothic novel. Some, including M. H. Abrams and Walter Scott, have argued that a novel is a fiction narrative that displays a realistic depiction of the state of a society, while the romance encompasses any fictitious narrative that emphasizes marvellous or uncommon incidents.

Works of fiction that include marvellous or uncommon incidents are also novels, including The Lord of the Rings, To Kill a Mockingbird, and Frankenstein. "Romances" are works of fiction whose main emphasis is on marvellous or unusual incidents, and should not be confused with the romance novel, a type of genre fiction that focuses on romantic love. (Full article...)

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The Historian is the 2005 debut novel of American author Elizabeth Kostova. The plot blends the history and folklore of Vlad III the Impaler (pictured) and his fictional equivalent Count Dracula. Kostova's father told her stories about Dracula when she was a child, and later in life she was inspired to turn the experience into a novel. She worked on the book for ten years and then sold it within a few months to Little, Brown, and Company, which bought it for a remarkable US$2 million. The Historian has been described as a combination of genres, including Gothic novel, adventure novel, detective fiction, travelogue, postmodern historical novel, epistolary epic, and historical thriller. It is concerned with history's role in society and representation in books, as well as the nature of good and evil. The evils brought about by religious conflict are a particular theme, and the novel explores the relationship between the Christian West and the Islamic East. Little, Brown, and Company heavily promoted the book and it became the first debut novel to become number one on The New York Times bestseller list in its first week on sale. As of 2005, it was the fastest-selling hardback debut novel in US history. Kostova received the 2006 Book Sense award for Best Adult Fiction and the 2005 Quill Award for Debut Author of the Year. Sony has bought the film rights and, as of 2007, were planning an adaptation.

Selected novel quote

'You should learn not to make personal remarks,' Alice said with some severity; 'it's very rude.'
The Hatter opened his eyes very wide on hearing this; but all he said was, 'Why is a raven like a writing-desk?'
'Come, we shall have some fun now!' thought Alice. 'I'm glad they've begun asking riddles. — I believe I can guess that,' she added aloud.
'Do you mean that you think you can find out the answer to it?' said the March Hare.
'Exactly so,' said Alice.
'Then you should say what you mean,' the March Hare went on.
'I do,' Alice hastily replied; 'at least — at least I mean what I say — that's the same thing, you know.'
'Not the same thing a bit!' said the Hatter. 'You might just as well say that "I see what I eat" is the same thing as "I eat what I see"!'
'You might just as well say,' added the March Hare, 'that "I like what I get" is the same thing as "I get what I like"!'
'You might just as well say,' added the Dormouse, who seemed to be talking in his sleep, 'that "I breathe when I sleep" is the same thing as "I sleep when I breathe"!'
'It is the same thing with you,' said the Hatter, and here the conversation dropped, and the party sat silent for a minute, while Alice thought over all she could remember about ravens and writing-desks, which wasn't much.

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

More selected quotes

Did you know...

...that The Vampyre (pictured) was a short novel first published on April 1, 1819 in parts in the New Monthly Magazine with the false attribution "A Tale by Lord Byron"?
...that Prathapa Mudaliar Charithram was the first novel in Tamil?
...that Sara Gruen’s historical novel Water for Elephants recounts that circus workers were sometimes thrown off the circus train in the middle of the night, a practice known as "redlighting"?

More Did you know facts More...

General images

The following are images from various novel-related articles on Wikipedia.

Image 1A light novel bookstore in Macau (from Light novel)
Image 2The modern picaresque began with the Spanish novel Lazarillo de Tormes (1554) (title page) (from Picaresque novel)
Image 3Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy, vol.6, pp. 70–71 (1769) (from Novel)
Image 4Intimate short stories: The Court and City Vagaries (1711). (from Novel)
Image 5One of the first and most influential pre-modern picaresque novels was The Golden Ass by Apuleius, which he published sometime in the 2nd century CE. (ms. Vat. Lat. 2194, Vatican Library) (1345 illustration). (from Picaresque novel)
Image 6Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) (from Novel)
Image 7A nineteenth-century painting by the Swiss-French painter Marc Gabriel Charles Gleyre depicting a scene from Longus's Daphnis and Chloe (from Romance novel)
Image 8Paper as the essential carrier: Murasaki Shikibu writing her The Tale of Genji in the early 11th century, 17th-century depiction (from Novel)
Image 9Woodcut of a fairy-circle from a 17th-century chapbook (from Chapbook)
Image 10Novelization of chapter 8 of the film series Les Vampires (1915–16). (from Novelization)
Image 11Madame de Pompadour spending her afternoon with a book (François Boucher, 1756) (from Novel)
Image 12Adventure novels and short stories were popular subjects for American pulp magazines. (from Adventure fiction)
Image 13"Oh Edward! How can you?", a late-19th-century illustration from Sense and Sensibility (1811) by Jane Austen, a pioneer of the genre (from Romance novel)
Image 14First edition of Aleksis Kivi's The Seven Brothers (1870) (from Novel)
Image 151474: The customer in the copyist's shop with a book he wants to have copied. This illustration of the first printed German Melusine looked back to the market of manuscripts. (from Novel)
Image 16Richard Head, The English Rogue (1665) (from Novel)
Image 17A modern-day chapbook (from Chapbook)
Image 181915 novelization of the original 1904 play Peter and Wendy (from Novelization)
Image 19Harlequin novels (from Romance novel)
Image 20Chinua Achebe, Buffalo, 2008 (from Novel)
Image 21Chapbook frontispiece of Voltaire's The Extraordinary Tragical Fate of Calas, showing a man being tortured on a breaking wheel, late 18th century (from Chapbook)
Image 22Chaucer reciting Troilus and Criseyde: early-15th-century manuscript of the work at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge (from Novel)
Image 23King Kong (1932) novelization of King Kong (1933) (from Novelization)
Image 24The chapbook Jack the Giant Killer (from Chapbook)
Image 251719 newspaper reprint of Robinson Crusoe (from Novel)
Image 26Image from a Victorian edition of Walter Scott's Waverley (1814) (from Novel)
Image 27Dan Brown (from Novel)
Image 28Statue of Ostap Bender in Elista (from Picaresque novel)
Image 29Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Vladivostok, 1995 (from Novel)
Image 30J. K. Rowling, 2010 (from Novel)
Image 31Samuel Richardson's Pamela (1741) (from Novel)

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