Despite the title, this is not a remedial manual for people frightened by novels.

Instead, Eagleton is interested in the habits of attention that make literary reading different from merely extracting information. He explores how openings establish pressure, how characters are made from language rather than discovered behind it, how narrative voice positions the reader, and how rhythm, syntax and form produce meaning before a text has finished “saying” anything.

Moving through poetry, fiction and drama, he reads Milton, Dickens, Shakespeare, Hardy, Woolf, Beckett and others very closely, showing how they become working examples of how interpretation happens. Accessible, argumentative and often very funny, this is a useful introduction to literary criticism for readers who want more than plot summary but have no interest in being buried alive beneath terminology. It teaches reading not as decoding a hidden correct answer, but as learning to make sharper, better-supported claims about what language is doing.

Yale University Press paperback, first paperback edition, 2014. Light shelf wear; clean and sound.