As a novelist, it was almost inevitable that I would enjoy a book which sets out to persuade us how, and why, the novel matters – and I did.

The epigraph comes from Elizabeth Bowen’s from Notes on Writing a Novel:’The novel lies, in saying something happened, that did not’, and the book opens with an exploration of what realism is, via Zadie Smith’s essay, Two Directions for the Novel. The second part, entitled ‘Matter’, discusses how, in novels, ‘we propose bodies taking up spaces in the full knowledge that these bodies and these spaces do not exist.’ This is followed by a fascinating account of temporality in the novel, and the final chapter is The Novel,  Justice, and the Law. There is much to chew over in here; I highly recommend for anyone who either creates, or critiques, novels.