'This timely volume addresses the substantial and growing body of work by contemporary Irish novelists, and helps us to understand the forces and energies that drive their achievement and success. These stimulating essays offer fresh insights into the preoccupations of some of Ireland's most gifted writers, as they try to tell the story of the inner life of a society that is changing at a tremendous pace, while also remaining strange, alluring and deadly.' - Robert Welch, Professor of English, University of Ulster, editor of The Oxford Companion to Irish Literature'...the collection offers tough-minded and informative individual analyses, which should investigate further worthwhile theoretical work on Irish fiction.' - Patricia Coughlan, The Irish Times'This book is a remarkably alert and up-to-date series of critiques of recent Irish fiction...It projects an Ireland, both North and South, which is changing rapidly in mores and assumptions...What is most surprising and heartening is how the communities in these novels are, on the whole, portrayed as having the capacity for rapid change. The criticisms break new ground by not simply confining themselves to the evils of the traditional in the face of a brave new world, but showing how the new world and the old manage to negotiate a shared territory...[The book] applies to fiction techniques which up to now have commonly been confined to poetry. Its appearance is a watershed in the criticism of the busyworld of the modern Irish novel.' - Bernard O' Donoghue, Fellow in English, Wadham College, Oxford
