Featuring a broad range of contemporary British novelists from Iain Banks to Jeanette Winterson, Louis de Bernieres to Irvine Welsh and Salman Rushdie, this book offers an excellent introductory guide to the contemporary literary scene. Each entry includes concise biographical information on each of the key novelists and analysis of their major works and themes. Fully cross-referenced and containing extensive guides to further reading, Fifty Contemporary British Novelists is the ideal guide to modern British fiction for both the student and the contemporary fiction buff alike.

Bradbury argues that almost a century since the emergence of Modernism, it is now possible to see the entire period in perspective. It is clear that the first 50 years - from Henry James, Wilde and Stevenson, through James Joyce, Lawrence, Forster, to Huxley, Isherwood and Orwell - have been extensively discussed in print. The years since World War II, though, have not been examined in depth, yet have produced talents such as Graham Greene, Angus Wilson, Beckett, Doris Lessing, Margaret Drabble, Angela Carter, Ian McEwan, Kingsley and Martin Amis, Julian Barnes, Fay Weldon, Salman Rushdie and Timothy Mo.

Focuses on the novels published since 2000 by twenty major British novelistsThe Contemporary British Novel Since 2000 is divided into five parts, with the first part examining the work of four particularly well-known and highly regarded twenty-first century writers: Ian McEwan, David Mitchell, Hilary Mantel and Zadie Smith. It is with reference to each of these novelists in turn that the terms arealist, apostmodernist, ahistorical and apostcolonialist fiction are introduced, while in the remaining four parts, other novelists are discussed and the meaning of the terms amplified. From the start it is emphasised that these terms and others often mean different things to different novelists, and that the complexity of their novels often obliges us to discuss their work with reference to more than one of the terms.Also discusses the works of: Maggie OFarrell, Sarah Hall, A.L. Kennedy, Alan Warner, Ali Smith, Kazuo Ishiguro, Kate Atkinson, Salman Rushdie, Adam Foulds, Sarah Waters, James Robertson, Mohsin Hamid, Andrea Levy, and Aminatta Forna.

From the New York Times–bestselling author of Legends of the Fall: “Harrison spins the common chaff of a road trip into gold” (Tim McNulty, The Seattle Times). “It used to be Cliff and Vivian and now it isn’t.” With these words, Jim Harrison begins a riotous, moving novel that sends a sixty-something man, divorced and robbed of his farm by a late-blooming real estate shark of an ex-wife, on a road trip across America. Cliff is armed with a childhood puzzle of the United States and a mission to rename all the states and state birds, the latter of which have been unjustly saddled with white men’s banal monikers up until now. His adventures take him through a whirlwind affair with a former student from his high-school-teacher days twenty-some years before, to a “snake farm” in Arizona owned by an old classmate, and to the high-octane existence of his son, a big-time movie producer who has just bought an apartment over the Presidio in San Francisco. Jim Harrison’s riotous and moving cross-country novel, The English Major, is the map of a man’s journey into, and out of, himself. It is vintage Harrison—reflective, big-picture American, and replete with wicked wit. “The English Major is to midlife crisis what The Catcher in the Rye is to adolescence.” —Susan Salter Reynolds, Los Angeles Times

-- Booklist