The story of the novel

A novel is a long work of fiction written in prose. Compared with epic poetry or drama, it can move freely between places and times, follow many characters, and, above all, explore the inner thoughts of its characters in depth.

The word comes from the Italian novella, meaning a new story or piece of news. Novels are now so familiar that it is easy to forget they became the dominant literary form only in the last few centuries.

Long prose stories existed in the ancient world, including Greek romances and the Latin works The Satyricon by Petronius and The Golden Ass by Apuleius. In Japan, The Tale of Genji, written in the early eleventh century by Murasaki Shikibu, a lady at the imperial court, is often called one of the world's first novels for its psychological depth.

China produced great long prose narratives, including Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Journey to the West and, in the eighteenth century, Dream of the Red Chamber. In Europe, Miguel de Cervantes's Don Quixote, published in two parts in 1605 and 1615, is widely regarded as the first modern European novel, a comic story about a man who reads so many chivalric romances that he sets out to become a knight.

The novel flourished in eighteenth-century Britain, helped by growing literacy, a rising middle class with leisure time and cheaper printing. Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe of 1719, Samuel Richardson's Pamela and Henry Fielding's Tom Jones told stories of ordinary people in realistic settings.

Novels were once seen as frivolous or even morally dangerous, especially for young women readers. Yet women were central to the form as both readers and writers. Jane Austen's novels, such as Pride and Prejudice of 1813, combined sharp social observation with irony and are still widely read.

• Serialisation in magazines made novels affordable; Charles Dickens published most of his works in monthly instalments.
• Realism aimed to depict society accurately, as in Honoré de Balzac, Gustave Flaubert and George Eliot.
• Russian novelists Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoevsky explored history, faith and moral crisis on a vast scale.
• Gothic and genre fiction grew, from Mary Shelley's Frankenstein to detective stories and science fiction.
• Novels became vehicles for social criticism, addressing poverty, slavery and the position of women.

Early twentieth-century modernists experimented with form. James Joyce's Ulysses and Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway used stream of consciousness to follow the flow of characters' thoughts, and Franz Kafka's surreal stories captured anxiety and alienation.

After 1945 the novel became truly global. Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart of 1958 told the story of colonialism from an African perspective, Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude popularised magical realism, and writers such as Toni Morrison, Salman Rushdie and Haruki Murakami reached readers worldwide.

Novels let readers experience lives very different from their own over hundreds of pages. Some psychologists have studied whether reading literary fiction improves the ability to understand other people's thoughts and feelings; results are mixed, but the idea reflects a long-held belief about the value of reading.

Despite competition from film, television and the internet, novels continue to sell in huge numbers, both in print and as e-books and audiobooks, and they supply many of the stories adapted for screens.