What is a novel? A novel is an extended fictional narrative, usually written in prose. Its characters, events, and settings may be invented or drawn partly from real life. Unlike a news report or biography, a novel is free to invent what someone thinks and feels, whether its action covers a single day or many years.
Access to an imagined inner life is one strength of the form, not a requirement. Three words help explain the usual definition: extended, prose, and fiction. The sections below explore their limits, including verse novels and the uncertain boundary with shorter fiction.
The Definition in Three Words
A standard novel definition leans on prose first. Most novels use sentences and paragraphs. Verse novels also exist, such as Alexander Pushkin's Eugene Onegin and Vikram Seth's The Golden Gate. These are exceptions to the usual prose definition.
Fiction is the second test, and the word itself explains why. English took "novel" from the Italian novella, meaning a new tale or piece of news. A novel can draw on documented events without claiming that its whole narrative is a factual account.
Leo Tolstoy gave Napoleon an imagined inner life in War and Peace. Historians could tell him where Napoleon stood at Borodino, what orders went out, and some of his reported remarks. Tolstoy imagined what the emperor felt, and that invention contributes to the book's fictional narrative.
A memoir can read exactly like a novel. It still claims to report what happened. The line between the two is that claim, and style has nothing to do with it.
Novels, Novellas, and Short Stories
Extended is the third word, and the hardest to pin down. A short story usually follows a single incident with a handful of characters. A novella runs longer and can follow a situation through several turns, but it usually keeps one main line of action. Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis and John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men are standard examples.
The Hugo and Nebula awards use 40,000 words as the minimum length for their novel categories. That threshold applies to those award categories; literary usage has no universal word-count boundary. Greater length gives a writer room to develop a story in several ways. A writer can open a subplot and let it run alongside the main story until the two collide. A second or third character can carry chapters of their own. Time can pass in earnest, so a child on page one is an adult at the end, and the change has been shown in stages.
Gregor Samsa wakes up as an insect, and Kafka keeps the story inside that one apartment and that one family almost to the last page. A longer narrative could have followed his sister for years afterward, but it would not have to. Subplots, large casts, and decades of action are possibilities that length allows, not requirements for a novel.
Plot, Character, Setting, and Theme
Textbooks list the characteristics of a novel as plot, character, setting, and theme. The first three are materials: events linked by cause, people with something at stake in them, and a time and place with its own rules. Theme is what the materials are for. It is also the element readers most often get wrong, because they confuse it with an issue.
An issue names a subject. A theme makes a claim about it. John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath takes up the issue of Dust Bowl migration. Its theme is closer to the idea that displaced people survive by binding themselves to one another. You can name an issue in a word. A theme usually takes a sentence.
A novel can develop its theme through the unfolding story. The issue in Charles Dickens's Great Expectations is class. Pip moves from blacksmith's apprentice to snobbish gentleman to a humbler adult, and the theme arrives only through that whole arc: the money that made him a gentleman also made him ashamed of the people who loved him first. A pamphlet could state that in a line. Dickens takes hundreds of pages to make you believe it.
Narrator, Author, and Point of View
Every novel has a narrator, and the narrator is not the author. Herman Melville wrote Moby-Dick. Ishmael tells it, starting with "Call me Ishmael." The distinction matters most when a narrator's judgment fails. Stevens, the butler who narrates Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day, misreads his own life, and the novel works because readers see what he cannot.
First-person narration uses "I" and limits the story to what one character knows or admits. Third-person narration uses "he," "she," or "they." Third-person limited stays close to one character's mind. Henry James's The Ambassadors filters nearly everything through Lambert Strether. Third-person omniscient moves freely among many minds and can comment on them. George Eliot's narrator in Middlemarch does exactly this, stepping back to judge a whole town. The choice of viewpoint decides what the reader learns, and when.
Where the Novel Came From
No one invented the novel, and which book counts as the first depends on the features you require. Prose fiction is ancient. Longus wrote Daphnis and Chloe in ancient Greece, and Petronius wrote the Satyricon in Rome.
What changed afterward was where the story took place. Murasaki Shikibu's The Tale of Genji, written in Japan in the early 11th century, moves the action inside its characters. Courtiers exchange poems, and the book dwells on what each reads into the other's lines: jealousy and regret that cannot be said aloud at court. It follows those feelings across decades and keeps going after Genji dies, into the lives of the next generation.
Miguel de Cervantes's Don Quixote, published in two parts in 1605 and 1615, made a related move in Europe. It mocks chivalric romances by sending a deluded hero into a realistic world of inns and roads, so the comedy lives in the gap between what he sees and what is there.
Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (1719) gave that inner life to an ordinary man. The book presented itself as written by Crusoe himself, and much of it is a merchant's son keeping track of his own survival. At one point he sets out his situation in two columns, evil against good, to argue himself out of despair. Readers got a hero who worried and kept accounts the way they did. Ian Watt's 1957 study The Rise of the Novel tied this turn to Defoe, Samuel Richardson, and Henry Fielding, and to growing literacy and a market for print.
How Genre Fits In
Mystery, romance, science fiction, and historical fiction are literary genres. The novel can itself be called a broad literary form or genre; these more specific categories describe the kind of story it tells. A genre works like a recipe. Agatha Christie's Murder on the Orient Express uses a familiar mystery framework: a body, a detective, and a closed set of suspects on a train stopped by snow. Yet its solution overturns the convention of a single culprit. It is a mystery and a novel at once, just as Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall is both historical fiction and a novel.
Christie challenges a different convention in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926): the narrator who has helped the detective all along turns out to be the killer. Stevens misleads readers by accident. This narrator does it on purpose. Readers had assumed a mystery's narrator could be trusted, and some complained that Christie had cheated. The book is still a mystery and still a novel, because the form never promised to follow a genre's rules.
What Novels Do for Readers
Length gives the novel its main power. A novel can follow one mind through years of change, show what a character thinks while saying something else, and trace how small choices add up. Novels have also served as argument. Cervantes used Don Quixote to puncture a fashion for chivalric tales, and Dickens used his serials to put poverty and the workhouse in front of middle-class readers. Many novels exist mainly to entertain, and that is a purpose too.
Middlemarch shows that power working across a whole community. Dorothea Brooke marries the dry scholar Casaubon. The young doctor Lydgate falls into debt. While he is treating Raffles, a blackmailer who knows the banker Bulstrode's past, Bulstrode advances Lydgate money. After Raffles dies and Bulstrode's past becomes public, townspeople suspect that the money was a bribe connected with Raffles's treatment and death. Lydgate accepted it innocently, but the suspicion damages his reputation. A secret from one man's past threatens another man's future.
Key Takeaways
- A novel is an extended fictional narrative, usually in prose; it may draw on real people, events, and places.
- Novels are generally longer than novellas. Subplots, large casts, and long time spans are possibilities, not requirements.
- An issue names a subject, while a theme makes a claim about that subject.
- The narrator is never the author, and a narrator can be wrong or can lie.
- Genres are recipes inside the form, and a novel can break one without ceasing to be a novel.
Frequently Asked Questions
What's the difference between a novel and a book?
A book is a written or printed work, usually consisting of pages bound together; books also have digital editions. A novel is a particular kind of literary work: an extended fictional narrative, usually in prose. A book can contain a novel, but it can also contain poetry, history, or other writing.
What is a novella?
A novella is prose fiction longer than a short story but shorter than a novel, though the boundaries vary. It often has a concentrated plot and a small cast, but those features are tendencies rather than firm classification rules.
Does the word "novel" have two meanings?
Yes. As a noun it names the literary form, and as an adjective it means new or unusual, as in "a novel idea." Both come from the same root meaning "new."
Is there a list of the 18 main types of novels?
No standard list of 18 types exists. Publishers, libraries, and teachers group novels in different ways. Common categories include mystery, romance, science fiction, fantasy, horror, historical, literary, and coming-of-age fiction, and the count depends on who is sorting.
Is a novel a genre?
Yes, in a broad literary classification: scholars also discuss the novel as a genre. For a more specific description, distinguish the novel as a form from categories such as mystery, romance, or thriller. A single work can therefore be both a novel and a thriller.
What makes a novel a novel?
A novel is an extended fictional narrative, usually written in prose. Length helps distinguish it from shorter fiction, although there is no universal word-count boundary. It need not contain subplots, a large cast, or years of action.
Recognizing the Form Behind the Story
Stevens's account of his life shows one use of the form: readers can recognize what a character cannot admit. Other novels emphasize action, social relationships, or experiments with language. Access to thought is one possibility, not the test that determines whether a work belongs.