Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age is a novel written in one 117 page sentence.
Czech novelist Bohumil Hrabal’s Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age unfurls as a single, sometimes maddening sentence that ends after 117 pages without a period, giving the impression that the opinionated, randy old cobbler will go on jawing ad infinitum.
The Polish novelist Jerzy Andrzejewski went even longer in The Gates of Paradise, weaving several voices into a lurid and majestic 158-page run-on sentence. (The novel actually consists of two sentences, the final one a mere five words long.)
The most famous mega-sentence in literature comes at the end of the book, not the beginning. Molly Bloom’s monologue from Ulysses, actually two long sentences, thanks to an often-overlooked period 17 pages in, feels unstoppable, and then it stops.
The Guinness Book of World Records has an entry for what it claims is the longest sentence in English, from William Faulkner's novel Absalom, Absalom! containing 1,287 words.
The last section of James Joyce's Ulysses, Molly Bloom's soliloquy, consists of two sentences. The first one is 11,281 words long, and the second is 12,931 words long.
Jonathan Coe's 2001 novel The Rotters' Club contains a 13,955-word sentence.
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