The first scholarly study of the phenomenon of the ‘late-career novel’, this book explores the ways in which bestselling contemporary novelists look back and respond to their earlier successes in their subsequent writings. Exploring the work of major novelists such as Angela Carter, V.S. Naipaul, Salman Rushdie, Ian McEwan, Julian Barnes, A.S. Byatt and Graham Swift, The Late-Career Novelist draws for the first time on social psychology and career construction theory to examine how the dynamics of a literary career play out in the fictional worlds of our best-known novelists. From here, Hywel Dix develops and argues for a new mode of reading contemporary writing on the contexts of current literary culture.