Swing Time

Satisfying and thoughtful

Satisfying and thoughtful

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.

Endlessly satisfying... [Zadie Smith] has never written better. Pitch-perfect, masterful and sophisticated

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.

Clever, funny, confident and kind. Her gift for language is a pleasure and her character shines through

[Smith] packs more intelligence, humour and sheer energy into any given scene than anyone else of her generation

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

Zadie Smith at her finest... [An] unflinching portrait of friendship... [A] triumph

Ingenious, inspired... Zadie Smith's new novel is very good indeed

Shrewd observation and sly satire, profundity and genuine purpose, as well as some of the most heart-stoppingly lyrical writing of her career

Zadie Smith is the author of the novels White Teeth , The Autograph Man , On Beauty , NW, Swing Time and The Fraud ; as well as a novella, The Embassy of Cambodia ; four collections of essays, Changing My Mind, Feel Free , Intimations and Dead and Alive ; a collection of short stories, Grand Union ; and the play, The Wife of Willesden , adapted from Chaucer. She is also the editor of The Book of Other People . Zadie Smith was born in north-west London, where she still lives.