Peter Childs offers accessible analyses of the work of twelve prominent writers, including Martin Amis, Pat Barker, Zadie Smith and Jeanette Winterson. Focusing on their most-studied writings, Childs develops new readings of these authors' key novels, while the introduction explains the dominant concerns of British fiction from 1970-2003, the period's historical context, and the "state of fiction" at the beginning of the twenty-first century.