A provisional re-mapping of Scotland's post-devolution literary culture, these fifteen essays explore how literature, theatre and visual art have both shaped and reflected the 'new Scotland' promised by parliamentary devolution. Chapters explore leading figures such as Alasdair Gray, David Greig, Kathleen Jamie and Jackie Kay, while also paying particular attention to women's writing by Kate Atkinson, A. L. Kennedy, Denise Mina, Ali Smith, Louise Welsh, and writers of colour such as Bashabi Fraser, Annie George, Tendai Huchu, Chin Li and Raman Mundair. Tracing continuities with 1990s debates alongside 'edges of the new' visible since Indyref 2014, these critics offer an in-depth study of Scotland's vibrant literary production in the period of devolution, viewed both within and beyond the frame of national representation.

Contemporary Scottish fiction is vigorous, vivid and diverse, eschewing the straitjackets of genre and resisting categorisation as either 'mainstream' or 'literary'. Meanwhile, Scotland itself refuses to conform to external notions of what it is, and what it can become. The literature of this post-devolution nation comes in a multitude of voices. The Space of Fiction examines how Scottish writers have responded to, and been affected by, the nation's ongoing political discourse. Examining in detail the works of Des Dillon, Anne Donovan, Michel Faber, Laura Hird, Alison Miller, Ewan Morrison, James Robertson, Suhayl Saadi, Zoe Strachan and their contemporaries, The Space of Fiction traces their multifarious approaches to a post-national, cosmopolitan, multicultural and even globalised Scotland, and explores their notions of space, of place, and of the impact of fiction on the nature of identity.