An essential guide to authors and their works that focuses on the general canon of British literature from the fifteenth-century to the present. There is also some coverage of non-fiction such as biographies, memoirs, and science, as well as inclusion of major American and Commonwealth writers.

This online-exclusive new edition adds 63,000 new words to the original text, including over 100 new entries dealing with authors who have risen to prominence in the last ten years, as well as fully updating the entries that currently exist. There are over 3,200 entries for writers in total with their nationality and birth/death dates, followed by a listing of their titles arranged chronologically by date of publication.