How to Read a Novel: A User's Guide [Paperback]

"'Engaging, intelligent.' The Times 'Sutherland takes us on a swift and entertaining tour of fiction's engine room... Passionate about his subject... he reminds us, quoting Paul Auster, "it is the reader who writes the book and not the writer".' TLS 'I can't think of anyone better qualified, anyone with quite the same combination of pizzazz, technical know-how and sheer enthusiasm as Professor Sutherland.' Independent on Sunday"

`enlightening stuff'

John Sutherland takes the reader on a literary journey from the first English novels of three hundred years ago to the present avalanche of ten thousand a year. In a series of informed and intelligent conversations set around a variety of exemplary texts he shows that reading a novel is not a spectator sport, but an intense participatory activity. People of all ages, classes and nationalities read novels - Sutherland gives us new insights into what we read, new questions to pose and the means to pursue them.

John Sutherland is Professor of Modern English Literature at University College London and a visiting professor at the California Institute of Technology. He has published twenty books (including Is Heathcliff a Murderer? Great Puzzles in 19th Century Fiction) and writes a weekly column for the Guardian. He was chairman of the 2005 Man Booker Prize for Fiction.