Swing Time: LONGLISTED for the Man Booker Prize 2017

Description

The bestselling, prize-winning, generation-defining Zadie Smith's new unmissable novel out in paperback Dazzlingly energetic and deeply human, Swing Time is 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. Two brown girls dream of being dancers - but only one, Tracey, has talent. The other has ideas- about rhythm and time, about black bodies and black music, what constitutes a tribe, or makes a person truly free. It's a close but complicated childhood friendship that ends abruptly in their early twenties, never to be revisited, but never quite forgotten, either...

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; three collections of essays, Changing My Mind, Feel Free and Intimations; 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. The Fraud is her first historical novel.

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 *