The Reader's Companion to the Twentieth-Century Novel (The Reader's Companion)

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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 authior 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 its editors? Which novel did Evelyn Waugh describe as 'an obscene book about domestic servants'?, 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.
Each entry supplies a summary of the plot, places the novel in a biographical and historical context, and provides a critical assessment. The entries are arranged chronologically , which gives a fascinating insight into the sort of books people were reading at any given period, and each year is prefaced by a selection of contemporary events from the worlds of the arts, science and politics, providing a background against which the novels were written and published. The chronological arrangement also allows the reader to trace the development of phases in twentieth-century fiction and to follow the development of individual authors. The book is fully cross-referenced and is supplemented by alphabetical indexes of novels and authors.