Edward Soja's notion of the “spatial turn” has, understandably, been interpreted in a multitude of ways across the humanities. In Contemporary British Literature and Urban Space: After Thatcher, Kim Duff employs the term to analyze both Thatcherite policies of social reform and the “affective geographies” of British city space in late-twentieth and early twenty-first fiction. Drawing on a diverse assemblage of contemporary authors ranging from J. G. Ballard to Alan Hollinghurst, Duff asserts that authors are using urban spatial theory to deconstruct cultural identities under and after Thatcher.

The book is organized into four chapters, each examining a related facet of the dialectics of urban space. The first chapter engages in a broad discussion of English heritage and nostalgia in Julian Barnes' England, England (1998) and Iain Sinclair's Lights Out for the Territory (1997). Echoing Thatcherite privatization of territory and services, Duff suggests that the two texts envision a marketization of British history in which spaces and identities are manufactured for profit. Her reading of England, England critically interrogates Barnes' dystopic vision of a commercialized theme park to offer an analogy of how history is rewritten in the novel to disregard the spatialities and identities of localized place. However, the texts are suggested to also provide a counter to Thatcherite intervention, generating a sense of nostalgia for both historical pasts and counter-factual futures that could have emerged if not for neoliberal policy.

In the second chapter Duff focuses more specifically on the issue of spatialized identities, exploring the ways by which urban locales reflect the abjection of the working classes following Thatcherite rule. Linking the dystopic representations of class warfare in J. G. Ballard's High Rise (1975) to Irvine Welsh's Trainspotting (1993), Duff explores how class and cultural discontent has spatio-historical significance stretching from the late 1970s to the millennial turn. Focusing on the abject urban spaces of council estates and tower blocks in the two novels, the chapter brings together a discussion of neoliberal social policy that details the alienation less affluent communities felt during the period. Ballard's text, by interrogating the dialectic between identity and urban architecture, is suggested to indicate the ways by which neoliberal ideology and practices “create a new kind of citizen and, in turn, a new kind of community” (85). Duff's take on Welsh's Trainspotting furthers this theory, suggesting that due to processes of deindustrialisation (and the subsequent fracturing of the working classes), main character Mark Renton and his associates are forced to re-imagine their socio-political role and cultural identity in Edinburgh.

Duff continues this theme into the following chapter, exploring representations of race and “otherness” in Monica Ali's Brick Lane (2003) and Hanif Kureishi's My Beautiful Laundrette (1985). Offering a close reading of Brick Lane, Duff argues that the novel interrogates shifting notions of identity and belonging in postmillennial London, paying attention to the cosmopolitanization of urban space. Drawing on the work of Paul Gilroy and Stuart Hall, Duff asserts that the cultural production of identity in the novel is complicated by ethnicity and racial grouping. The chapter points toward the limited movements afforded to immigrant communities in the neoliberal spaces of a post-Thatcherite city, while simultaneously claiming that the protagonist Nazneen functions as a “diasporic postmodern flaneuse” (111) who is able to escape the socially restrictive ties to her Bengali community. Duff argues that Nazneen's struggle to appear “British” involves a rejection of her historical identity in favor of a Thatcherite accumulation of wealth and loss of identity. Kureishi's protagonist Omar is suggested to suffer the same fate; his mediation between Pakistani and British cultural ties result in a hybrid identity out of place in Thatcher's Britain. Indeed, Duff sees Omar's entrepreneurial verve as a reflection of Thatcherite values, integral to his process of becoming “British.” Ultimately, Omar's embrace of economic opportunity means rejecting cultural empathy. In contrast to Zadie Smith's White Teeth (2000), which envisions a more optimistic and cosmopolitan take on millennial London life, these two texts are argued to be more backward looking in their acknowledgment of both the continuation of historical prejudices and the maintenance of cultural identities.

In her concluding chapter, Duff remarks that Thatcher's policies of privatization, social reform, and immigration continue to “haunt British culture” (150) and adds to this list the absence of gay rights in a post-Thatcherite landscape. Accordingly, the chapter positions Hollinghurst's The Line of Beauty (2004) as a direct response to the failure of the successive Labour government to embrace those oppressed and marginalized groups and break away from outdated British sociopolitics. Duff interprets Thatcher's physical features to become cultural signifiers of neoliberal values in the novel; the protagonist Nick Guest's appropriation and synthesis of these features are suggested to coincide with his accumulation of social currency. To complement this reading, Duff provides a clear—if brief— reading of Will Self's Dorian (2002) that examines the Victorian sensibilities of Thatcherite social policy in strategically denigrating HIV-positive gay males as a threat to a fully functioning society. In this way, she reveals how the novel explores “the dark underbelly of Thatcherite policies” (151) founded on a platform of stigmatism and social isolation.

Duff ultimately provides an accessible, lucidly written, and wide-ranging analysis of how Thatcher's legacy is perceived in contemporary literature. Although concluding statements are rather brief, she provides clear, individualized readings of each text followed by cross-thematic readings to elicit a deeper engagement between Thatcherite policy and literary representation. More importantly, the work serves as a reminder that, in understanding contemporary literature, there must be an engagement with the sociopolitical inheritance of the past. In doing so, Duff's analysis reveals the intrinsic relation between literary studies and urban spatial theory, and is essential reading to literary and political researchers alike.