With contributions from Great Britain, Ireland, America, Canada, Australia, India, and Southern Africa; influenced by great novelists working in other languages; and encompassing a range of genres, the story of the novel in English unfolds like a richly varied landscape that invites exploration rather than a linear journey.

No previous author has attempted a book such as this: a complete history of novels written in the English language, from the genre's seventeenth-century origins to the present day. In the spirit of Dr. Johnson’s Lives of the Poets, acclaimed critic and scholar John Sutherland selects 294 writers whose works illustrate the best of every kind of fiction—from gothic, penny dreadful, and pornography to fantasy, romance, and high literature. Each author was chosen, Professor Sutherland explains, because his or her books are well worth reading and are likely to remain so for at least another century. Sutherland presents these authors in chronological order, in each case deftly combining a lively and informative biographical sketch with an opinionated assessment of the writer's work. Taken together, these novelists provide both a history of the novel and a guide to its rich variety. Always entertaining, and sometimes shocking, Sutherland considers writers as diverse as Daniel Defoe, Henry James, James Joyce, Edgar Allan Poe, Virginia Woolf, Michael Crichton, Jeffrey Archer, and Jacqueline Susann. Written for all lovers of fiction, Lives of the Novelists succeeds both as introduction and re-introduction, as Sutherland presents favorite and familiar novelists in new ways and transforms the less favored and less familiar through his relentlessly fascinating readings.

George Meredith: The Life and Writing of an Alteregoist is not only a critical biography of the Victorian novelist and poet George Meredith but also a portrait of the novel in the later nineteenth century. Interweaving analysis of Meredith’s novels and poems with discussion of his life, Richard Cronin focuses primarily on the books Meredith read and wrote—arguing that novels by the end of the nineteenth century were shaped as much by the reading as by the experience of their writers. Cronin places Meredith’s novels in relation to the work of his contemporaries including Henry James, Thomas Hardy, and George Gissing. Organized thematically, the book explores Meredith’s personal side—including his hostility to biography, his origins as the son of a tailor, his marriages—as well as his reading habits, and the prose style that is the most complete expression of his strange but compelling personality.