The novel now: contemporary British fiction

I: Realism versus modernism: win, lose or draw?

Before now. A brief account of the pre-1970s British novel

Something unusual: Martin Amis and Ian McEwan

The effects of thatcherism

The new postmodernists

II: Excursions from the ordinary

The new historical novel

Crime and spy fiction

III: Sex

Women

Men

Gay fiction

IV: Nation, race and place

Scotland

England, Englishness and class

The question of elsewhere

Wales

The troubles

Epilogue: the state of the novel.