Anovel is a piece of prose fiction of a reasonable length. Even a
definition as toothless as this, however, is still too restricted. Not
all novels are writtten in prose. As for fiction,
the distinction between fiction and fact is not always clear. And what counts
as a reasonable length? At what point does a novella or long short story
become a novel? André Gide’s The Immoralist is usually described as a novel,
and Anton Chekhov’s ‘The Duel’ as a short story, but they are both about
the same length.