North West London comes vividly to life in NW , the new novel by the author of the bestselling White Teeth and Man Booker-shortlisted On Beauty . This is the story of a city. The north-west corner of a city. Here you'll find guests and hosts, those with power and those without it, people who live somewhere special and others who live nowhere at all. And many people in between. Every city is like this. Cheek-by-jowl living. Separate worlds. And then there are the visitations: the rare times a stranger crosses a threshold without permission or warning, causing a disruption in the whole system. Like the April afternoon a woman came to Leah Hanwell's door, seeking help, disturbing the peace, forcing Leah out of her isolation...Zadie Smith's brilliant tragi-comic new novel follows four Londoners - Leah, Natalie, Felix and Nathan - as they try to make adult lives outside of Caldwell, the council estate of their childhood. From private houses to public parks, at work and at play, their London is a complicated place, as beautiful as it is brutal, where the thoroughfares hide the back alleys and taking the high road can sometimes lead you to a dead end. Depicting the modern urban zone - familiar to town-dwellers everywhere - Zadie Smith's NW is a quietly devastating novel of encounters, mercurial and vital, like the city itself.
'A tremendous talent.' (Boyd Tonkin, Independent).
'A writer of remarkable wit and originality.' (Observer).
'One of the handful of novelists writing at present who really matter and who, we may confidently assume, will last . She is canonical.' (The Times).
[It is] impossible not to admire Smith's marriage of humanity, humour and intellect. (Irish Times).
'An outstanding novelist with the powerful understanding both of what the brain knows and what love knows.' (Observer).
Author
About Zadie Smith
Zadie Smith was born in north-west London in 1975, and continues to live both there and in New York, where she teaches on the Creative Writing programme at NYU.
White Teeth was first published in 2000 and won the Guardian First Book Award, the Whitbread Prize for a First Novel, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction, the WH Smith Book Award for New Talent, the Frankfurt eBook Award for Best Fiction Work Originally Published in 2000 and both the Commonwealth Writers First Book Award and Overall Commonwealth Writers Prize.
Zadie Smith's other novels are The Autograph Man and On Beauty, which was shortlisted for The Man Booker Prize 2005 and won The Orange Prize for Fiction 2006. She is also author of a collection of essays, Changing my Mind, and the editor of a book of short stories, The Book of Other People.
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