What fiction have we been reading in the last hundred years? Who are the most popular authors and what are the most popular books and the most important genres? Such straightforward questions raise intriguing literary, cultural, social and intellectual responses which often require much detective work in the annals of lost literature.

What unites best-selling authors as diverse as Catherine Cookson and Stephen King, Jilly Cooper and J. R. R. Tolkien? Their fame is not the result of accident but of art, commerce and mass-reading habits which have also elevated writers whose million-sellers are now long forgotten and whose own fictional heroes are nostalgic memories.

The new study and reference work is the essential guide to best-selling books, authors and genres over the last one hundred years, providing an unique insight into a century of publishing and reading. From Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot to J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter, Bestsellers takes us on a journey into the heart of the British imagination.

'Clive Bloom's critical survey represents a new level of organised response to the vast magma of fiction underlying the quality novel and canonical titles of the twentieth century. His book is, in my judgement, the first attempt to look systematically and comprehensively at both the product and the machinery of production and their respectively changing nature from decade to decade. This is an important book in its own right; more importantly, it is a book that will be built on by other scholars in this expanding field of cultural exploration' - John Sutherland, University College London

'Clive Bloom delves incisively into the literary history of twentieth-century best-sellers, reminding us of the role of popular authors such as Hall Caine, Marie Corelli, Dennis Wheatley and Catherine Cookson have played in sustaining not only the economic fortunes of British publishing, but also the social habits of a British mass-reading public. Bloom offers us an archaeology of best-selling fiction that is impressively researched, thoughtfully argued and immensely readable' - David Finklestein, Head of Department, Media and Communications, Queen Margaret University College, Edinburgh

'Clive Bloom's Bestsellers will be an invaluable resource for both the student and the general reader of twentieth-century popular fiction. The book begins with a series of engaging and wide-ranging chapters on the principal publishing themes; but the bulk of the work comprises a very full series of pen-portraits of the best known popular authors. For pleasure, and for study, Bestsellers will be a much thumbed work of reference' - Dominic Head, Department of English, Brunel University