It brings together twenty-two British novelists, from Daniel Defoe to Virginia Woolf, and asks them to sit down together in E. M. Foster's famous 'circular room'. The resulting crossfire of critical and personal comment brings alive the history of the novel as the meeting place for a wide variety of remarkable men and women, each with a highly individual conception of life and art.

The exchange takes place on a wide variety of levels, too. At one extreme we find Smollett jeering at Fielding's marriage; at the other we watch Henry James or Virginia Woolf painstakingly erecting a theory of fiction from the study of other novelists such as George Eliot or D. H. Lawrence. Through reviews, poems, journals, diary entries, letters and eulogies, we watch the novelists define themselves while defining those who have gone before.

Nor is it all enmity. Here are documented the close friendships and warm admirations which testify, in the most human sense, to the tradition of the novel. Above all these people carede about their art - the novel, and about people - their public.

All the selections are carefully made and, listed by author and subject, provide a comprehensive portrait of each novelist and an insight into their thoughts on novel - writing. The contributors to the book are those perhaps most qualified to talk about the craft of fiction: the writers themselves.