Generous enjoyable and well informed. Observer500 expertly potted plots and personal comments on a wide range of pop and proper prose fiction. The TimesRanging all the way from Aarons Rod to Zuleika Dobson via The Devil Rides Out and Middlemarch literary connoisseur and sleuth John Sutherland offers his very personal guide to the most rewarding most remarkable and on occasion most shamelessly enjoyable works of fiction ever written.He brilliantly captures the flavour of each work and assesses its relative merits and demerits. He shows how it fits into a broader context and he offers endless snippets of intriguing information did you know for example that the Nazis banned Bambi or that William Faulkner wrote As I Lay Dying on an upturned wheelbarrow that Voltaire completed Candide in three days or that Anna Sewell was paid 20 for Black Beauty It is also effectively a history of the novel in 500 or so wittily informative bitesized pieces.Encyclopaedic and entertaining by turns this is a wonderful dipin book whose opinions will inform and on occasion no doubt infuriate.Anyone hooked on fiction should be warned this book will feed your addiction. Mail on SundayA dazzling array of genres periods styles and tastes... chatty insightful unprejudiced but not uncritical and wise. Times Literary Supplement