The jacket design of this splendid book shows Lewis Carroll’s Alice pulling back a curtain to reveal the door into Wonderland. In the original story, it leads to ‘a small passage, not much larger than a rat-hole’, at the end of which Alice notices ‘the loveliest garden you ever saw’. She is too large to squeeze through this doorway, but questions whether she might be able to defy the laws of physics and get into the garden anyway; after all, she tells herself, so many curious things have happened to her already that it seems ‘very few things indeed were really impossible’.

It’s hard to imagine a better metaphor for reading a work of fiction. Open a story like Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and even tiny passages of writing can lead you to places where the usual rules of life are temporarily suspended. Most of us do this so often we simply take it for granted; but sometimes it’s worth reminding ourselves of what a mind-altering miracle the act of reading is. As Stephen King put it in his guide On Writing: ‘Books are a uniquely portable magic.’  Pluck one off the shelf and it can give you different personalities to try on and new experiences to try out, allowing you to be simultaneously yourself and someone else, or to be living here (this bedroom, this train, this waiting room) and elsewhere (New York, Narnia, the Ocean at the End of the Lane) without having to move a muscle. Reading turns the planet from a giant full stop into a limitless blank space we can populate with our dreams.

Pluck a book from the shelf and it will give you new personalities to try on and new experiences to try out

Pluck a book from the shelf and it will give you new personalities to try on and new experiences to try out

This could be true of any work of imaginative literature, but it’s especially true of the novel, a uniquely restless, rummaging literary mongrel that emerged in the 18th century, cobbling together elements of older forms, like conduct manuals, moral essays and prose romances, to create something entirely new. For the first time, Philip Hensher points out, people were no longer doomed to the lives they had been born into. Instead, they could imagine creating different possible futures for themselves, and with its rich range of........

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