The novel is today stronger than it ever was. 'Classics', boosted by a hugely successful string of TV and film adaptations, now enjoy a mass readership. The book deals with canonical and popular twentieth-century literature from Virginia Woolf to J.G. Ballard. Sutherland asks questions such as 'if Conrad's Heart of Darkness is set in the Belgian Congo in the 1890s, why does the manager's boy say Mistah Kurtz, he dead rather than M'sieur Kurtz, il est mort? or to enquire exactly what airline and aircraft Michael Crichton is alluding to with the TPA's N-12 in Airframe. Pursuing puzzles, conundrums and anomalies in our favourite fiction and most revered narratives, from high literature to pulp fiction, Sutherland offers an extremely refreshing way of looking at novels which gets one closer to the magical ways in which fiction works.