How do novelists communicate with their readers and involve us with their characters? In this book, the author answers this question with analyses of many kinds of narrative - from Homer to Hemingway, from the Book of Job to James Joyce. He considers, for example, how Henry James uses unreliable narrators (who reveal far more than they are aware of), how Jane Austen controls our sympathy and judgement and how objective novelists such as Flaubert convey their beliefs and values as clearly as prophets like D.H.Lawrence.