Bloomsbury The 2000s: A Decade of Contemporary British Fiction (The Decades Series)

How did social, cultural and political events in Britain during the 2000s shape contemporary British Fiction? The means of publishing, buying and reading fiction changed dramatically between 2000 and 2010. This volume explores how the socio-political and economic turns of the decade, bookended by the beginning of a millennium and an economic crisis, transformed the act of writing and reading. Detailed chapters look at the writers tracing and shaping the limits of being human through neurological fiction. Attention is given to the reinvigoration of psychogeography as a genre, dealing with the concerns of living in a virtual and globalized world, as well as the effects of reading groups and literary prizes and the reworking of fact and fiction in historical novels. This major literary assessment of the fiction of the 2000s covers the work of new voices such as Monica Ali, Mark Haddon, Tom McCarthy and Zadie Smith as well as Salman Rushdie, John Banville and Ian McEwan making it an essential contribution to reading, defining and understanding a decade marked by anxieties.