Abstract

This article reads the novels of contemporary British writer Sam Taylor as indicative of an increasing concern in British novels of the twenty-first-century with foregrounding temporal experience through disruptive, non-linear and non-contemporaneous narrative frameworks (what I am calling metachronous times). Influenced by an earlier generation of experimental British writers concerned with the powerful critique available to “speculative” fictions – notably Doris Lessing, J. G. Ballard and Muriel Spark – a generation of younger and/or “pre-canonical” novelists are offering new ways of imagining subjectivity and challenging traditional realism by explicitly experimenting with narrative times.