A charming, eloquent love letter to the stories and writers we loveA SPECTATOR BOOK OF THE YEAR‘This book is a wry, critical friend to both writer and reader.’ Hilary Mantel‘There are three rules for writing a novel,’ Somerset Maugham once said. ‘Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.’So how to bring characters to life, find a voice, kill your darlings, avoid plagiarism (or choose not to), or run that most challenging of literary gauntlets—writing a good sex scene?Veteran editor and author Richard Cohen takes us on a fascinating excursion into the lives and minds of our greatest writers—from Balzac and Eliot to Woolf and Nabokov, through to Zadie Smith and Stephen King, with a few mischievous detours to Tolstoy along the way. In a glittering tour d’horizon, he lays bare their tricks, motivations, techniques, obsessions and flaws. * Includes revealing insights from the lives of Vladimir Nabokov, Samuel Beckett, George Orwell, J. D. Salinger, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Mark Twain, Kate Atkinson, Philip Roth, Emily Brontë, Ali Smith, Franz Kafka, Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, Agatha Christie and many more *