In order to get more accurate results, our search has the following Google-Type search functionality:
If you use '+' in front of a word, then that word will be present in the search results.
ex: Harry +Potter will return results with the word 'Potter'.
If you use '-' in front of a word, then that word will be absent in the search results.
ex: Harry -Potter will return results without the word 'Potter'.
If you use 'AND' between two words, then both of those words will be present in the search results.
ex: Harry AND Potter will return results with both 'Harry' and 'Potter'.
If you use 'OR' between two words, then bth of those words may or may not be present in the search results.
ex: Harry OR Potter will return results with just 'Harry', results with just 'Potter' and results with both 'Harry' and 'Potter'.
If you use 'NOT' before a word, then that word will be absent in the search results.
ex: Harry NOT Potter will return results without the word 'Potter'.
Placing '""' around words will perform a phrase search. The search results will contain those words in that order.
ex: "Harry Potter" will return any results with 'Harry Potter' in them, but not 'Potter Harry'.
Using '*' in a word will perform a wildcard search. The '*' signifies any number of characters. Searches can not start with a wildcard.
ex: Pot*er will return results with words starting with 'Pot' and ending in 'er'. In this case, 'Potter' will be a match.
224
Before the novel, the world of books was dominated by scientific tomes, religious tracts and histories of the victorious in war. There had been stories and epic poems from ancient times - Homer's Iliad and Odyssey recounted ancient Greece, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight was a chivalric romance in Middle English, but it was not until the seventeenth century, when the European middle classes had money and leisure, that anything so frivolous as a novel could be sold for entertainment. Colin Salter traces the evolution of the novel from the earliest examples through to the postmodernist best-sellers of the 21st century. Rather than dwelling too long on the technical nuances of innovative writing style he has amassed 100 of the greatest novel writers and chosen their most significant work. For writers such as Herman Melville, James Joyce or Harper Lee the decision is not a difficult one. For Charles Dickens, Salman Rushdie and Margaret Atwood, the choice is perhaps more difficult. Following the style set with previous books in the 100 series, most notably 100 Children's Books and 100 Science Discoveries, each author is given a concise biography and their major novel analysed and then set in context with their other published work. Readers can become ridiculously well-read in 224 pages. Authors included: Alexandre Dumas, Daniel Defoe, Victor Hugo, Mary Shelly, Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, Charlotte Bronte, Emily Bronte, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Hilary Mantel, Jane Austen, Robert Louis Stevenson, Walter Scott, Lewis Carroll, JRR Tolkien, Gustave Flaubert, Marcel Proust, Henry James, Harper Lee, James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, Margaret Atwood, Alice Walker, Jules Verne, HG Wells, Virginia Woolf, Leo Tolstoy, Louisa M. Alcott, Arthur Conan Doyle, Bram Stoker, John Steinbeck, CS Lewis, Chinua Achebe, Jack Kerouac, John Le Carre, Arundhati Roy, Mila Kundera, Joseph Heller, JD Salinger, Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Miguel Cervantes, Graham Greene, F. Scott Fitzgerald, George Orwell, John Steinbeck, Evelyn Waugh, Robert Graves, Daphne du Maurier, Agatha Christie, PG Wodehouse, Raymond Chandler, Hunter S. Thompson, Khaled Hosseini.