This essay challenges the assumption that, as far as British writing at the beginning of the twenty-first century is concerned, experimental writing is synonymous with postmodernist writing. It is argued that two novels by Julian Barnes and Ian McEwan, both published in 2005, achieve indeterminacy as well as instability and evoke the experience o f alterity by using seemingly traditional narrative conventions, thus opening up new ways for the exploration of ethical concerns in contemporary fiction.