The Reader's Companion to the Twentieth-century Novel

Can you remember who marries the narrator of A Dance to the Music of Time? Or what happens at the end of Nineteen Eighty-Four? Of which English classic did the author remark: 'How unexpected, how odd that people can read that difficult, grinding stuff'? Which American classic, left unfinished at its author's death, was put together by editors? Which novel did Evelyn Waugh (inaccurately) describe as 'an obscene book about domestic servants'? How many times has the Booker Prize been awarded to non-British writers? Who won the National Book Award in 1960: John Updike? Flannery O'Connor? John Barth? Harper Lee? What novels were people reading when the TLS was first published? When Madame Butterfly was first performed? When Matisse painted The Dance? When Wall Street crashed? When the Titanic sank? When Einstein formulated his General Theory of Relativity? When bobbed hair was all the rage? And which year was that? The answer to all these questions, and many more, will be found in The Reader's Companion to the Twentieth Century Novel. An informative and invaluable guide to modern fiction, it contains detailed accounts of some 750 novels from Britain, Ireland, the United States, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Africa, India and the Caribbean. All the century's major novelists are represented, alongside less celebrated writers whose work has been unjustly neglected or fallen victim to the vagaries of literary fashion.