Description:
<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title>
<jats:p>This article contrasts three different ways of understanding contemporary British communal life: interpretive accounts based on quantitative political science which stress division and rising ethnocentrism; an account drawing on Arendtian political theory, which again stresses division and loneliness; and accounts developed from three very different contemporary novels: Sarah Moss’s <jats:italic>Ghost Wall</jats:italic> (2018); Barney Farmer’s <jats:italic>Drunken Baker</jats:italic> (2018); Bernard Cornwell’s, <jats:italic>Warlord</jats:italic> (2020). Each explores the current bleak state of the UK in different ways.</jats:p>