This seminar will offer a reading of seven very recent novels from Britain and Ireland. "Very recent" means published since 2000, and the aim is to give students some sense of the range and quality of contemporary British fiction. English, Scottish, and Irish authors are represented in the reading; most are established writers but some are newer. Some of the novels are more experimental or (in one case) wacky, while others are more traditional. Most (as it happens) tell stories which are in one way or another about childhood experience. All of them are challenging and provocative. They are: William Trevor's The Story of Lucy Gault, Trezza Azzopardi’s The Hiding Place, Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, Lucy Ellmann’s Dot in the Universe, V.S. Naipaul’s Half a Life, Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach, and Ali Smith’s Hotel World