English novel John Bunyan's "The Pilgrim's Progress" (1678) and Aphra Behn's "Oroonoko" (1688) are also contenders, while earlier works such as Sir Thomas Malory's "Morte d'Arthur", and even the "Prologue" to Geoffrey Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales" have been suggested. Another important early novel is "Gulliver's Travels" (1726, amended 1735), by Irish writer and clergyman Jonathan Swift, which is both a satire of human nature, as well as a parody of travellers' tales like "Robinson Crusoe". The rise of the novel as an important literary genre is generally associated with the growth of the middle class in England. Other major 18th-century English novelists are
In the Light of What We Know In the Light of What We Know In the Light of What We Know is the debut novel of Zia Haider Rahman. First published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, the novel was released in the spring of 2014 to international critical acclaim and earned its author the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, Britain's oldest literary prize. and the inaugural International Ranald McDonald prize 2016. The novel has already been translated into Dutch, French and Portuguese and is to be translated into several other languages. Much of the novel is set during the war in Afghanistan at the beginning of the