“ Superb. One of the most entertaining novels you'll read this year ”
The Times Literary Supplement
“ Smith's finest [novel]. Truly marvellous, so extraordinary. Has brilliant things to say about race, class and gender ”
Observer
“ A thrilling, multilayered tour-de-force ”
Los Angeles Times
“ Smith has never written better. Her dialogue is pitch-perfect, her comic timing masterful ”
Daily Telegraph, Books of the Year
“ Dazzling ”
Irish Independent
“ A true, beautifully executed tragicomedy. Some of the most heart-stoppingly lyrical writing of Smith's career ”
Scotland on Sunday
Paperback
9780141036601
July 17, 2017
Penguin General UK
464 pages
Hardback
9780241144152
November 1, 2016
Hamish Hamilton
432 pages
EBook
9780241965306
November 15, 2016
Penguin eBooks
It was the first day of my humiliation. Put on a plane, sent back home, to England, set up with a temporary rental in St John’s Wood. The flat was on the eighth floor, the windows looked over the cricket ground. It had been chosen, I think, because of the doorman, who blocked all enquiries. I stayed indoors. The phone on the kitchen wall rang and rang, but I was warned not to answer it and to keep my own phone switched off. I watched the cricket being played, a game I don’t understand, it offered no real distraction, but still it was better than looking at the interior of that apartment, a luxury condo, in which everything had been designed to be perfectly neutral, with all significant corners rounded, like an iPhone. When the cricket finished I stared at the sleek coffee machine embedded in the wall, and at two photos of the Buddha – one a brass Buddha, the other wood – and at a photo of an elephant kneeling next to a little Indian boy, who was also kneeling. The rooms were tasteful and grey, linked by a pristine hallway of tan wool cord. I stared at the ridges in the cord.
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