Completely revised and updated to include the most up-to-date selections, this is a bold and bright reference book to the novels and the writers that have excited the world's imagination. This authoritative selection of novels, reviewed by an international team of writers, critics, academics, and journalists, provides a new take on world classics and a reliable guide to what's hot in contemporary fiction. Featuring more than 700 illustrations and photographs, presenting quotes from individual novels and authors, and completely revised for 2012, this is the ideal book for everybody who loves reading.

Author Biography

Peter Boxall is a senior lecturer in English Literature at the University of Sussex. He has published widely on drama and twentieth-century fiction and contributes regularly to journals such as The Yearbook of English Studies. He has recently published a Reader's Guide to Samuel Beckett's drama and current projects include co-editing The Year's Work in Critical and Cultural Theory, Don DeLillo: The Possibility of Fiction and a study on contemporary fiction, Since Beckett. Peter Ackroyd is well known for writing historical fiction. His awards are numerous, including the Guardian Fiction Prize, Whitbread Biography Award, Royal Society of Literature William Heinemman Award and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize to name but a few. He has written biographies on T.S. Eliot, Charles Dickens and more and also holds a C.B.E for services to literature. London