What Is Considered The Longest Novel In The World Today?
Need authoritative sources; what's the actual word count for the top contenders, and do modern web serials count towards the record now?
2026-07-31 23:19:03
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EvanRowe
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IsaacWest
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What about combined series where the author considers it one story? 'The Wheel of Time' by Robert Jordan (and finished by Brandon Sanderson) is fourteen massive books. If you glued them all together, it would be a monster. Same with 'The Malazan Book of the Fallen' by Steven Erikson—ten incredibly dense volumes. For fans, these are single, continuous narratives. They may not hold a Guinness record, but in the fantasy genre, they are the benchmarks for epic scale and length.
2026-08-01 15:32:34
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GentleHub
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What's the longest novel ever written in English? That might be 'The Blah Story' by Nigel Tomm, which is allegedly 11 million words, but I've never met anyone who's actually seen or read it. It seems more like an artistic stunt than something meant for consumption. So there's a distinction between 'longest' as a factual record and 'longest' as a meaningful piece of literature someone would actually read for pleasure.
2026-08-05 22:27:14
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ZoeyBowen
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The Chinese classic 'Dream of the Red Chamber' is one of the Four Great Classical Novels and is incredibly long and complex. It's a cornerstone of Chinese literature, with a huge cast and intricate social detail. It's a different tradition of long-form storytelling that deserves a mention in any global discussion of length. Its influence on culture is as massive as its page count.
2026-08-06 15:38:02
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MaxByrd
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I think the obsession with 'the longest' misses the point of literature. It's not a sporting record. A novel's value isn't in its word count but in what it does with those words. A perfectly crafted 200-page novel can contain more life and truth than a meandering 2,000-page saga. Let's celebrate conciseness and precision as much as we do ambition and scale. Sometimes less is profoundly more.
2026-08-06 15:54:44
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The manga 'Kochira Katsushika-ku Kameari Kōen-mae Hashutsujo' holds the Guinness record for most volumes by a single author for a single manga series. That's a different medium, but the principle is similar: a single creative vision sustained over decades. The 'why' is often a combination of popularity, author stamina, and the serialized magazine format that demands constant output. It becomes a part of national culture. For novels, that kind of longevity is rarer because the publishing model is different. A novelist isn't typically expected to produce a new chapter of the same story every week for 40 years. So the longest narratives are often found in serialized comics or TV soaps, not in traditional literature.
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