“Novel”, defined
At Over The Sea Sartorias quotes a quirky defintion of “Novel” from the 1771 edition of Encyclopædia Britannica:
NOVEL, in matters of literature, a fictitious history of a series of entertaining events in common life, wherein the rules of probability are or ought to be strictly observed.
The modern Britannica article on Novel describes the term as:
NOVEL, an invented prose narrative of considerable length and a certain complexity that deals imaginatively with human experience, usually through a connected sequence of events involving a group of persons in a specific setting.
While the modern description is more complete, I quite like the expression “a fictitious history of a series of entertaining events in common life”.