Swing Time

Satisfying and thoughtful * Daily Telegraph * Publisher's description. Dazzlingly energetic and deeply human, Swing Time is Zadie Smith's most ambitious novel yet: a story about friendship and music and true identity, how they shape us and how we can survive them. Moving from north-west London to West Africa, it is an exuberant dance to the music of time. * Penguin * Endlessly satisfying... [Zadie Smith] has never written better. Pitch-perfect, masterful and sophisticated * Telegraph * Zadie Smith is the best writer of our generation, and Swing Time is her best book to date. As the title promises, the novel swings and pulsates with life, filled with emotion, excited by intellect and haunted by sadness. What a miracle that literature can still do things other forms of art cannot. What a miracle that Zadie Smith is among us, writing. -- Gary Shteyngart Clever, funny, confident and kind. Her gift for language is a pleasure and her character shines through * Evening Standard * [Smith] packs more intelligence, humour and sheer energy into any given scene than anyone else of her generation * Sunday Telegraph * Zadie Smith's finest novel. Extraordinary, virtuosic... [It] does what only literature can and what only great literature will: forces us to assess the very vocabulary with which we speak of human experience * Observer * Zadie Smith at her finest... [An] unflinching portrait of friendship... [A] triumph * Guardian * Ingenious, inspired... Zadie Smith's new novel is very good indeed * Sunday Times * Shrewd observation and sly satire, profundity and genuine purpose, as well as some of the most heart-stoppingly lyrical writing of her career * Scotland on Sunday * A powerful story of lives marred by secrets, unfulfilled potential, the unjustness of the world...and the dances people do to rise above it all * Economist * A sweeping meditation on race and identity... [Smith's] most ambitious work yet * Esquire * A nuanced, richly rewarding tale * Mail on Sunday *

Zadie Smith is the author of the novels White Teeth, The Autograph Man, On Beauty, NW and Swing Time, as well as a novella, The Embassy of Cambodia, and a collection of essays, Changing My Mind. She is also the editor of The Book of Other People. Zadie was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2002, and was listed as one of Granta's 20 Best Young British Novelists in 2003 and again in 2013. White Teeth won multiple literary awards including the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, the Whitbread First Novel Award and the Guardian First Book Award. On Beauty was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and won the Orange Prize for Fiction, and NW was shortlisted for the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction. Zadie Smith is currently a tenured professor of fiction at New York University and a Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.