It is difficult to describe this book in a sentence, or even to say what it is about; it is more an erudite, idiosyncratic, rather dense compendium than a coherent argument. The novel is much older than is often thought (the Odyssey has sometimes been claimed as one of the genre) and modern scholarship has established that the Graeco-Roman world cultivated it more than was formerly believed. Apuleius, Heliodorus, Longus of Dapnis and Chloe fame, Petronius are all discussed at length, and so are the Renaissance fiction writers and the novelists of the 18th century. The later sections, however, tend to get bogged down in abstractions and generalisations, and the virtual omission of Chinese and Japanese literature (including The Tale of Genji) seems rather a Black Hole.