400 years after the publication of Don Quixote, William Egginton reveals how Cervantes came to invent what we now call fiction, and how fiction changed the world. He explores Cervantes’s life and the world he lived in, showing how his work radically changed the nature of literature and created a new way of viewing the world. Finally, he explains how that worldview went on to infiltrate art, politics and science, and how the world today would be unthinkable without it.