The Penguin Podcast is back! Listen Now
Swing Time

Swing Time

LONGLISTED for the Man Booker Prize 2017

Summary

LONGLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2017

SHORTLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARDS 2017

'Smith's finest. Extraordinary, truly marvellous' Observer


A dazzlingly exuberant novel moving from north west London to West Africa, from the critically acclaimed author of White Teeth, On Beauty and Grand Union

Two brown girls dream of being dancers - but only one, Tracey, has talent. The other has ideas: about rhythm and time, black bodies and black music, what it means to belong, what it means to be 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.

Bursting with energy, rhythm and movement, Swing Time is Zadie Smith's most ambitious novel yet. It is a story about music and identity, race and class, those who follow the dance and those who lead it . . .

'Superb' Financial Times 'Breathtaking' TLS 'Pitch-perfect' Daily Telegraph

'There is still no better chronicler of the modern British family than Zadie Smith' Telegraph

Reviews

  • Satisfying and thoughtful
    Daily Telegraph

About the author

Zadie Smith

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.
Learn More

Sign up to the Penguin Newsletter

For the latest books, recommendations, author interviews and more