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What do you believe makes a good novel?

L C Knights was an English literary critic, an authority on Shakespeare. He said a good novel, 'Makes me walk more in the world.'

J F Kermode, another Cambridge man, was a British literary critic best known for his work The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction. He judged a novel to be good if it was re-readable.

I am in the world of a good novel days after I have finished reading it.

Asked by: Adrian Sroka

  1. Lin Churchill on December 16, 2012

    The ones where I go to drink my cup of tea, and find it's gone cold.

    4

  2. Andrew Hall on December 17, 2012

    A good book grabs you by the end of first page and doesn't let you go until you have finished the whole thing....and leaves you wanting more.

    2

  3. Geoff Lee on December 17, 2012

    When I can't wait for the author to publish the next one.

    3

  4. Victoria Whithear on December 17, 2012

    "I am in the world of a good novel days after I have finished reading it."

    Me too, but I think the best novel of all is the one you fondly recall years later like an old memory. If characters stay with you that long, were so strong you remember the images you created in your mind and endeared themselves to the point you smile decades later, the novelist really got it right.

    I know I've seen the film The Lovely Bones but I don't remember it. When I try to recall it all my own images of the amazing book I read a few years before fill my mind. Now that's a book.

    1

  5. Dolores Pinto on December 19, 2012

    One that takes me to another place, one that I want to return to again and again. Alternatively one like Alone in Berlin or Blood Meridian that you want to escape from, but can't, because of the power of the story and the images burnt into your inner eye.

    2
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