

Lord of the Flies, William Golding – 59,900 words.As I Lay Dying, William Faulkner – 56,695 words.The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain – 109,571 words.Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte – 107,945 words.Gullivers Travels, Jonathan Swift – 107,349 words.To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee – 100,388 words.However, there are intelligent books in all genres, so literary fiction is really just the upper echelons of books considered ‘good’ by revered critics and academics. One thing that seems to connect all books considered ‘literary’ is that they are all considered to be intelligently written. Literary fiction is a slightly difficult genre to define sometimes, as it tends to contain a mixture of all genres. Of course, figures differ depending on which publisher you ask, so the following figures are merely approximations derived from various sources. However, there are averages and rough word counts expected by publishers. There are no hard-and-fast rules when it comes to what word count a novel in a particular genre should be. An epic novel is anything over 110,000 words.The average novel is usually between 80,000 and 100,000 words.

A novella is usually between 20,000 and 50,000 words.


