Typically written in prose, a novel is a piece of narrative fiction that is published as a book.

Typically,
it is quite lengthy. The current English term for a lengthy piece of prose fiction is the Italian term:
The word "new," "news," or "short story of something new" comes from the Latin word novella. The
neuter plural of novellus, which is the diminutive of novus and means "new," is the source of the
singular noun novella. The term "romance" was preferred by some authors, including Nathaniel
Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Ann Radcliffe, and John Cowper Powys.

Romanticism brought back the ancient romance form, especially Walter Scott's historical romances
and the Gothic novel.[7] Some people, like Walter Scott and M. H. Abrams, have argued that a novel
is a fiction story that shows the state of a society in a realistic way, while a romance is any fictitious
story that emphasizes amazing or unusual things.[8][9][10] Margaret Doody says that the novel has
"a continuous and unusual story."