How to Write Like Tolstoy

The Spectator Best Book of the Year and a charming, eloquent love letter to the stories we adore

A Spectator Best Book of the Year
There are three rules for writing a novel, Somerset Maugham once said. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.
So how to bring characters to life, find a voice, kill your darlings, avoid plagiarism (or choose not to), or run that most challenging of literary gauntlets writing a good sex scene?
Veteran editor and author Richard Cohen takes us on a fascinating excursion into the lives and minds of our greatest writers from Balzac and Eliot to Woolf and Nabokov, through to Zadie Smith and Stephen King, with a few mischievous detours to Tolstoy along the way. In a glittering tour d horizon, he lays bare their tricks, motivations, techniques, obsessions and flaws.