Swing Time

Satisfying and thoughtful

Daily Telegraph

[Smith] packs more intelligence, humour and sheer energy into any given scene than anyone else of her generation

Sunday 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

A nuanced, richly rewarding tale

Mail on Sunday

A powerful story of lives marred by secrets, unfulfilled potential and the unjustness of the world... interwoven with another beautiful story of the dances people do to rise above it all

Economist

A sweeping meditation on race and identity... [Smith's] most ambitious work yet

Esquire

Clever, funny, confident and kind. Her gift for language is a pleasure and her character shines through

Evening Standard

Endlessly satisfying... [Zadie Smith] has never written better. Pitch-perfect, masterful and sophisticated

Telegraph

Ingenious, inspired... Zadie Smith's new novel is very good indeed

Sunday Times

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

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

Zadie Smith at her finest... [An] unflinching portrait of friendship... [A] triumph

Guardian

Zadie Smith's finest novel. Extraordinary, virtuosic... The novel 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