Food and drink are essential to survival and are frequently deployed tropes, yet their intrinsic ambivalence often goes unrecognised. Consequently, representations of eating and drinking have vast, untapped interpretative potential. In Leftovers, Cruickshank creates a new theoretical approach to reveal how representations of food, drink and their consumption proliferate with overlooked figurative, psychological, ideological and historical interpretative potential. She reveals fascinating links between eating and drinking and language, desire, trauma, ideology, identity constructs and power relations. New critical combinations emerge for exploring representations of food and drink in terms of traces, remainders, lack, excess, abjection, distinction, bad faith, 'eating on the sly', 'eating well', incorporation and 'gastro-anomie'. Leftovers draws upon, and re-thinks, a diverse range of food-related post-war French thought from Barthes, Bataille, Beauvoir, Bourdieu, Certeau, Cixous, Derrida, Fischler, Kristeva, Lacan, Lefebvre, L vi-Strauss and Sartre. The power of this new critical approach is then revealed in case-study chapters which re-think important French post-war novels by Robbe-Grillet, Ernaux, Darrieussecq and Houellebecq. Leftovers makes an innovative contribution to understandings of modern and contemporary French thought, literature and culture. It also demonstrates the potential of re-thinking eating and drinking with leftovers for students and scholars of literary, comparative, film, cultural, gender and food studies.