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A novel is an extended work of narrative fiction usually written in prose and published as a book. The English word to describe such a work derives from the Italian: novella for "new", "news", or "short story (of something new)", itself from the Latin: novella, a singular noun use of the neuter plural of novellus, diminutive of novus, meaning "new". According to Margaret Doody, the novel has "a continuous and comprehensive history of about two thousand years", with its origins in the Ancient Greek and Roman novel, Medieval Chivalric romance, and in the tradition of the Italian Renaissance novella. The ancient romance form was revived by Romanticism, in the historical romances of Walter Scott and the Gothic novel. Some novelists, including Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Ann Radcliffe, and John Cowper Powys, preferred the term "romance". M. H. Abrams and Walter Scott have argued that a novel is a fiction narrative that displays a realistic depiction of the state of a society, while the romance encompasses any fictitious narrative that emphasizes marvellous or uncommon incidents. Works of fiction that include marvellous or uncommon incidents are also novels, including Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, and Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird. Such "romances" should not be confused with the genre fiction romance novel, which focuses on romantic love.

Murasaki Shikibu's Tale of Genji, an early 11th-century Japanese text, has sometimes been described as the world's first novel, because of its early use of the experience of intimacy in a narrative form. There is considerable debate over this, however, as there were certainly long fictional prose works that preceded it. The spread of printed books in China led to the appearance of classical Chinese novels during the Ming dynasty (1368–1644), and Qing dynasty (1616–1911). An early example from Europe was Hayy ibn Yaqdhan by the Sufi writer Ibn Tufayl in Muslim Spain. Later developments occurred after the invention of the printing press. Miguel de Cervantes, author of Don Quixote (the first part of which was published in 1605), is frequently cited as the first significant European novelist of the modern era. Literary historian Ian Watt, in The Rise of the Novel (1957), argued that the modern novel was born in the early 18th century.

Recent technological developments have led to many novels also being published in non-print media: this includes audio books, web novels, and ebooks. Another non-traditional fiction format can be found in graphic novels. While these comic book versions of works of fiction have their origins in the 19th century, they have only become popular recently. (Full article...)

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Halo: Contact Harvest is a military science fiction novel by Joseph Staten. Released in October 2007, it is the fifth novel based on the Halo video game franchise. Staten was a longtime employee of Bungie, the developer of the Halo video game series; he directed the cut scenes in the video games and is a major contributor to Halo's storyline. He set out to write a novel that appealed to gamers, as well as those who had never read a Halo novel.

Set in 2525, twenty-seven years before the events of Halo: Combat Evolved, the novel tells the story of the United Nations Space Command's first encounter with the alien collective known as the Covenant on the colony world of Harvest, and the beginning of the long war that follows. The novel is an ensemble piece, following human and alien characters. The protagonist is a young Marine, Staff Sergeant Avery Johnson, who also appears in the Halo video games. Upon release, the book was generally well received and became a New York Times bestseller in its first week. Critics pointed to the novel's success as a sign of the increasing importance of story in video games. (Full article...)

Selected novel quote

Religion is a solace to many people and it is even conceivable that some religion, somewhere, really is Ultimate Truth. But in many cases, being religious is merely a form of conceit. The Bible Belt faith in which I was brought up encouraged me to think that I was better than the rest of the world; I was 'saved' and they were 'damned' — we were in a state of grace and the rest of the world were 'heathens' and by 'heathen' they meant such people as our brother Mahmoud. It meant that an ignorant, stupid lout who seldom bathed and planted his corn by the phase of the Moon could claim to know the final answers of the Universe. That entitled him to look down his nose at everybody else. Our hymn book was loaded with such arrogance — mindless, conceited, self-congratulation on how cozy we were with the Almighty and what a high opinion he had of us and us alone, and what hell everybody else was going to catch come Judgment Day.

Stranger in a Strange Land

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Did you know...

...that Joe Keenan's 2006 novel My Lucky Star won the Thurber Prize for American Humor in 2007?
...that when Jean-Paul Sartre's classic first novel Nausea appeared in 1938, it was reviewed by Albert Camus, still a journalist in Algeria working on his own later-classic first novel, The Stranger?
...that the short story "The Congress" by Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges was published in a deluxe edition with the letters made of gold?

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General images

The following are images from various novel-related articles on Wikipedia.

Image 1Madame de Pompadour spending her afternoon with a book (François Boucher, 1756) (from Novel)
Image 2Chinua Achebe, Buffalo, 2008 (from Novel)
Image 3The picaresque genre began with the Spanish novel Lazarillo de Tormes (1554) (Pictured: Its title page) (from Picaresque novel)
Image 4Novelization of chapter 8 of the film series Les Vampires (1915–16) (from Novelization)
Image 5First edition of Aleksis Kivi's The Seven Brothers (1870) (from Novel)
Image 6Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) (from Novel)
Image 7A light novel bookstore in Macau (from Light novel)
Image 8The chapbook Jack the Giant Killer (from Chapbook)
Image 9J. K. Rowling, 2010 (from Novel)
Image 10Dan Brown (from Novel)
Image 11Harlequin novels (from Romance novel)
Image 12Paper as the essential carrier: Murasaki Shikibu writing her The Tale of Genji in the early 11th century, 17th-century depiction (from Novel)
Image 13A nineteenth-century painting by the Swiss-French painter Marc Gabriel Charles Gleyre depicting a scene from Longus's Daphnis and Chloe (from Romance novel)
Image 141915 novelization of the original 1904 play Peter and Wendy (from Novelization)
Image 151719 newspaper reprint of Robinson Crusoe (from Novel)
Image 16One of the most influential novels on the picaresque genre was The Golden Ass by Apuleius, which he published sometime in the 2nd century AD. (ms. Vat. Lat. 2194, Vatican Library) (1345 illustration). (from Picaresque novel)
Image 17Woodcut of a fairy-circle from a 17th-century chapbook (from Chapbook)
Image 18Statue of Ostap Bender in Elista (from Picaresque novel)
Image 191474: 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. (from Novel)
Image 20Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy, vol.6, pp. 70–71 (1769) (from Novel)
Image 21Chaucer reciting Troilus and Criseyde: early-15th-century manuscript of the work at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge (from Novel)
Image 22Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Vladivostok, 1995 (from Novel)
Image 23Image from a Victorian edition of Walter Scott's Waverley (1814) (from Novel)
Image 24A modern chapbook (from Chapbook)
Image 25Intimate short stories: The Court and City Vagaries (1711). (from Novel)
Image 26Adventure novels and short stories were popular subjects for American pulp magazines. (from Adventure fiction)
Image 27Samuel Richardson's Pamela (1741) (from Novel)
Image 28King Kong (1932) novelization of King Kong (1933) (from Novelization)
Image 29The frontispiece of a late 18th-century chapbook edition of Voltaire's The Extraordinary Tragical Fate of Calas, depicting Jean Calas being broken on the wheel (from Chapbook)
Image 30Richard Head, The English Rogue (1665) (from Novel)
Image 31"Oh Edward! How can you?", a late-19th-century illustration from Sense and Sensibility (1811) by Jane Austen, a pioneer of the genre (from Romance novel)