Students will be expected to obtain their own copies of these set texts
The Reluctant Fundamentalist by 'Excuse me, sir, but may I be of assistance? Ah, I see I have alarmed you. Do not be frightened by my beard. I am a lover of America . . . '
Never Let Me Go by A story of love, friendship and memory.
The Road by A father and his young son walk alone through burned America, heading slowly for the coast. Nothing moves in the ravaged landscape save the ash on the wind. They have nothing but a pistol to defend themselves against the men who stalk the road, the clothes they are wearing, a cart of scavenged food - and each other.
The Accidental by The Smart family's lacklustre holiday in Norwich is turned upside down when a beguiling stranger called Amber appears, bringing with her love, joy, pain and upheaval. The Smarts try to make sense of their bewildering emotions as Amber tramples over family boundaries and forces them to think about their world and themselves in an entirely new way. The Accidental is at once a mysterious web of secret identities and a ruthlessly honest look at the silent cracks that can develop unnoticed in relationships over time.
Written on the body by Written on the body is a secret code only visible in certain lights: the accumulation of a lifetime gather there.
Jeanette Winterson by In this comprehensive introduction to Winterson's work, Sonya Andermahr considers its significance in the context of contemporary British culture and literary history. Including an interview with the author, this guide offers an accessible reading of all Winterson's work and an overview of the varied critical reception this has received.
The Margin Without Centre: Kazuo Ishiguro by The title of this volume illustrates the significance of margins and the instability of demarcation in the fiction of Kazuo Ishiguro. The author approaches Ishiguro's writings as a corpus rather than separate units, examining the novels to illuminate their generic, theoretical or stylistic affiliations. The chapters attend to seemingly peripheral elements - trivial details, incoherent conversations, hackneyed notions, minor characters and everyday occurrences - in order to expose what is deliberately obscured or contained within the explicit narrative. The poststructuralist approach and the structuralist objective of this study may appear incongruous, but the seemingly incompatible pairing in fact articulates a number of paradoxes that Ishiguro's novels manifest: the alterity of the international, the disclosure of the concealed, the innovation of the banal, the significance of the trivial, the presence of the absent and the accord of the cacophonous.
Transgressing Boundaries in Jeanette Winterson's Fiction by The subsequent chapters of the book deal with selected questions from Jeanette Winterson's fiction, such as gender issues, love and eroticism, language and time, constituting areas within which Winterson's characters seek their identity. As they contest and repudiate clichés, stereotypes and patterns, their journey of self-discovery is accomplished through transgression. The book analyzes how the subversion of phallogocentric narrative and scenarios entails the reenvisaging of relations between the genders and reconceptualization of female desire. The author attempts to determine the consequences of Winterson's manipulations with gender, sexuality and time, and her disruption of the binary system.
Cormac Mccarthy and the Writing of American Spaces by 
The Poetics of Genre in the Contemporary Novel by The Poetics of Genre in the Contemporary Novel investigates the role of genre in the contemporary novel: taking its departure from the observation that numerous contemporary novelists make use of popular genre influences in what are still widely considered to be literary novels, it sketches the uses, the work, and the value of genre. It suggests the value of a critical look at texts' genre use for an analysis of the contemporary moment. From this, it develops a broader perspective, suggesting the value of genre criticism and taking into view traditional genres such as the bildungsroman and the metafictional novel as well as the kinds of amalgamated forms which have recently come to prominence. In essays discussing a wide range of authors from Steven Hall to Bret Easton Ellis to Colson Whitehead, the contributors to the volume develop their own readings of genre's work and valence in the contemporary novel.
Cormac Mccarthy by Even before Harold Bloom designated Blood Meridian as the Great American Novel, Cormac McCarthy had attracted unprecedented attention as a novelist who is both serious and successful, a rare combination in recent American fiction. Critics have been quick to address McCarthy's indebtedness to southern literature, Christianity, and existential thought, but the essays in this collection are among the first to tackle such issues as gender and race in McCarthy's work. The rich complexity of the novels leaves room for a wide variety of interpretation. Some of the contributors see racist attitudes in McCarthy's views of Mexico, whereas others praise his depiction of U.S.-Mexican border culture and contact. Several of the essays approach McCarthy's work from the perspective of ecocriticism, focusing on his representations of the natural world and the relationships that his characters forge with their geographical environments. And by exploring the author's use of and attitudes toward language, some of the contributors examine McCarthy's complex and innovative storytelling techniques.
Styles of Extinction: Cormac Mccarthy's The Road by Styles of Extinction: Cormac McCarthy's The Road brings together several leading literary scholars, one major philosopher, as well as a handful of emerging critical voices, all of whom deploy their own specialist methods in order to think through this bestselling, Zeitgeist-defining event of contemporary literature. There are two dominant modes of analysis gathered here: the first, performed by Julian Murphet, Paul Sheehan, and Mark Steven, is to locate the novel within its political, spiritual, and economic climates; the second, whose exponents include Paul Patton, Sean Pryor, Chris Danta, and Grace Hellyer, deals with the formal dimensions of McCarthy's characteristically brilliant prose in relation to its sparse narrative. By coupling historically sensitive analysis with incisive formal criticism, the contributors not only account for the matchless form of this exemplary novel; they also suggest that The Road has something unique to disclose about the world we inhabit.
Contemporary British Novelists: Jeanette Winterson by 
