Novel

"The Lighthouse at the End of the World" is one novels by Jules Verne, considered the father of science fiction.

Novels are books which have one long story written in them. They are works of prose fiction. They are longer than short stories and novellas. There are many kinds. For example, some are adventure stories, like Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson. There are horror (scary) stories like Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. There are also science fiction novels like Dune by Frank Herbert, and humorous novels like Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain. Novels in English are usually at least 60,000 words long. Some are much bigger, 150,000 words or more. Novels usually have 100 pages or more.

The first novels were written more than three hundred years ago. Some people say that Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes is the first novel. It was first published in 1605.

Genres of novels

There are many different genres, or categories, of novels. Some of these are:

• Campus
• Crime fiction
• Fantasy
• Gothic
• Horror
• Romance
• Spy
• Thriller
• Science fiction
• Speculative
• Westerns
• Picaresque
• Gothic Novel
• Sentimental Novel
• Weird fiction

Novel Media

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  Madame de Pompadour spending her afternoon with a book (François Boucher, 1756)

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  Paper as the essential carrier: Murasaki Shikibu writing her The Tale of Genji in the early 11th century, 17th-century depiction

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  1474: 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.

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  Richard Head, The English Rogue (1665)

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  1719 newspaper reprint of Robinson Crusoe

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  Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy, vol.6, pp. 70–71 (1769)

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  Samuel Richardson's Pamela (1741)

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  Intimate short stories: The Court and City Vagaries (1711).

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  Image from a Victorian edition of Walter Scott's Waverley (1814)