Novel facts for kids
Novels are long stories written in prose. Prose means it's written in normal sentences and paragraphs, not like poetry. Novels are a type of fiction, which means the stories and characters are made up. They are much longer than short stories.
There are many different kinds of novels. For example, some are exciting adventure stories, like Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson. Others are scary horror stories, such as Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. You can also find science fiction novels and funny (humorous) novels like Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain. A typical novel in English is usually 150 pages or more, and has over 150,000 words.
Different Kinds of Novels
Novels come in many different types, which we call genres or categories. Each genre has its own special style and themes. Here are some popular kinds of novels:
- Campus novels: Stories often set in colleges or universities.
- Crime fiction: These stories are about crimes, detectives, and solving mysteries.
- Fantasy: Novels filled with magic, mythical creatures, and imaginary worlds.
- Gothic: Often dark and mysterious, with old castles and spooky feelings.
- Horror: Designed to scare readers with suspense and frightening events.
- Romance: Stories focused on love and relationships between characters.
- Spy: Exciting tales about secret agents, espionage, and thrilling missions.
- Thriller: Fast-paced stories full of suspense, danger, and unexpected twists.
- Science fiction: Explores future technologies, space travel, aliens, and scientific ideas.
- Speculative: A broad term that includes fantasy, science fiction, and other imaginative stories.
- Westerns: Stories usually set in the American Old West, with cowboys and frontier life.
Images for kids
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Paper as the essential carrier: Murasaki Shikibu writing her The Tale of Genji in the early 11th century, 17th-century depiction
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Chaucer reciting Troilus and Criseyde: early-15th-century manuscript of the work at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge
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1474: A customer in a copyist's shop with a book he wants to have copied. This picture from the first printed German Melusine shows how books were made before printing presses.
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Richard Head, The English Rogue (1665)
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1719 newspaper reprint of Robinson Crusoe
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Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy, vol.6, pp. 70–71 (1769)
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Samuel Richardson's Pamela (1741)
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Intimate short stories: The Court and City Vagaries (1711).
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Image from a Victorian edition of Walter Scott's Waverley (1814)
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Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852)
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Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Vladivostok, 1995
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Chinua Achebe, Buffalo, 2008
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See also
In Spanish: Novela para niños
