A novel is a story written in prose, typically longer than 100 pages, that follows a character or a group of characters through a fictional or fictionalized series of events. The stories presented in novels can follow a linear chain of events or can play with the timeline of the story to make it more complex and provide more information concerning the events that have taken place (for example, a story may present a character and, in the next chapter, go back in time to explain the connection between the group and the new character). A novel may follow a strict "inciting incident > rising action > climax > falling action > resolution" format that has become the norm for stories, or can follow a more modernist approach with no clear defining moments.
Novels are self-contained stories, and though they can draw on reality, they create their own realities that have their own politics, cultures, and histories which form the worlds the author creates. Because of the novel’s ability to contain its own, unique world, the author can touch on issues that they perceive in the real world in a way that can provide a warning with no apparent solution, such as Margaret Atwood’s A Handmaids Tale, in which the issue of woman’s rights is explored in the novel’s fictional world where women have been whittled to merely serve a function with no freedom to choose how they live their lives. A novel can also provide a solution to a social issue, such as in Suzanne Collin’s The Hunger Games, which presents a dystopian world in which a group takes action and speaks out against an oppressive government, actions that culminate into a change in systems at the end of a series of three novels. These two stories, presented in the format of novels, take aspects of reality and exaggerate them to create a more complex challenge for the characters to overcome, while presenting the issues they examine in a way that is believable within their own reality.
Novels offer a plethora of choices to authors in its writing and to its readers, whether in genre, theme, length, or style. There is a novel out there for everyone, and everyone has a story that could be turned into a novel; you just have to find what is right for you.