Utopia and the contemporary British novel This book explores the narrative treatment of time from a philosophical perspective. I will be concerned with how the experience of lived time or temporality functions in a specific set of British novels to reveal the persistence of the utopian imagination in the twenty first century. Central to this book is the assertion that utopian expression not only persists within the twenty first century novel but is shaping an emerging body of fictions whose shared interrogation of lived and historical time reveals a series of radically nonlinear disjunct pluralised and alternative temporal constructions. The writers I have selected for inclusion within this study represent a renaissance of British literary talent in the contemporary period that cuts across different generations.