This new study offers innovative readings of key contemporary Irish novels, employing a range of historical, psychoanalytic and theoretical approaches. In reading texts by established writers such as Brian Moore and William Trevor against work by younger writers, including Roddy Doyle, Glenn Patterson and Kathleen Ferguson, Peach addresses the diversity of Irish fiction and the complexity of Northern Ireland and Ireland's history and culture. The book considers different modes of writing and themes such as postmodernity, gender, family, fetishism, Catholicism, historical trauma and intercorporeality.