Before the novel, the world of books was dominated by scientific tomes, religious tracts and histories of the victorious in war. There had been stories and epic poems from ancient times, but it wasn’t until the seventeenth century, when the European middle classes had money and leisure, that anything so frivolous as a novel could be sold for entertainment. Colin Salter traces the evolution of the novel from the earliest examples through to the postmodernist best-sellers of the 21st century.