Zadie Smith

Truth and fiction. Jamaica and Britain. Who deserves to tell their story? Zadie Smith returns with her first historical novel. Kilburn, 1873. The 'Tichborne Trial' has captivated the widowed Scottish housekeeper Mrs Eliza Touchet and all of England. Readers are at odds over whether the defendant is who he claims to be - or an imposter. Mrs Touchet is a woman of many interests: literature, justice, abolitionism, class, her novelist cousin and his wives,...

Interleaving ten completely new and unpublished stories with some of her best-loved pieces from the New Yorker and elsewhere, Zadie Smith presents a dizzyingly rich and varied collection of fiction.

Zadie Smith's tragi-comic 'NW' follows four Londoners - Leah, Natalie, Felix and Nathan - after they've left their childhood council estate, grown up and moved on to different lives. From private houses to public parks, at work and at play, their city is brutal, beautiful and complicated. Yet after a chance encounter they each find that the choices they've made, the people they once were and are now, can suddenly, rapidly unravel.

Zadie Smith takes us deep into the life of a young woman, Fatou, domestic servant to the Derawals and escapee from one set of hardships to another. Beginning and ending outside the Embassy of Cambodia, which happens to be located in Willesden, NW London, Zadie Smith's absorbing, moving and wryly observed story suggests how the apparently small things in an ordinary life always raise larger, more extraordinary questions.

'Changing My Mind' finds Zadie Smith casting an acute eye over material both personal & cultural. This engaging collection of essays, some published here for the first time, reveals Smith as a passionate & precise essayist, equally at home in the world of great books & bad movies, family & philosophy, British comedians & Italian divas.

In 'Feel Free', pop culture, high culture, social change, and political debate all get the Zadie Smith treatment, dissected with razor-sharp intellect, set brilliantly against the context of the utterly contemporary, and considered with a deep humanity and compassion. This electrifying new collection showcases its author as a true literary powerhouse, demonstrating once again her credentials as an essential voice of her generation.

When Howard Belsey's oldest son Jerome falls for Victoria, the stunning daughter of the right-wing Monty Kipps, both families find themselves thrown together, enacting a cultural and personal war against each other.