Both a passionate tribute to dance and a fearless examination of identity and difference, Smith’s bravura novel follows two young girls from the promise of youth to the compromised opportunities of adulthood. Written with all the author’s customary style and grace, Swing Time delights and stimulates on every page.
Longlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2017
Read the first chapter of Swing Time
The rest of it, all the detail, fell away… The story was the price you paid for the rhythm.
On an unremarkable Saturday in 1982, two girls meet. Two brown girls who both dream of being dancers - but only one, Tracey, has talent; a talent so undeniable she is taught to rely on it as a promise, as a way out. The other is taught she has ideas: about rhythm and time, about black bodies and black music, what constitutes a tribe, or makes a person truly free. She is taught her future is her own to decide.
Theirs a close but complicated childhood friendship that halts abruptly in their early twenties as their two paths diverge and their lives dance out of each other's view, but never out of their shadow.
Dazzlingly energetic and deeply human, Swing Time is a story about friendship and music and stubborn roots, about how we are shaped by these things and how we can survive them. Moving from north-west London to West Africa, it is a story about the turn and dip and sway of lives in endless, perpetual motion; an exuberant dance to the music of time.
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
ISBN: 9780141036601
Number of pages: 464
Weight: 321 g
Dimensions: 198 x 129 x 28 mm
Satisfying and thoughtful - Daily Telegraph
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
Endlessly satisfying... [Zadie Smith] has never written better. Pitch-perfect, masterful and sophisticated - 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
Clever, funny, confident and kind. Her gift for language is a pleasure and her character shines through - Evening Standard
[Smith] packs more intelligence, humour and sheer energy into any given scene than anyone else of her generation - Sunday Telegraph
Zadie Smith's finest novel. Extraordinary, virtuosic... [It] 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
Zadie Smith at her finest... [An] unflinching portrait of friendship... [A] triumph - Guardian
Ingenious, inspired... Zadie Smith's new novel is very good indeed - Sunday Times
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
A powerful story of lives marred by secrets, unfulfilled potential, the unjustness of the world...and the dances people do to rise above it all - Economist
A sweeping meditation on race and identity... [Smith's] most ambitious work yet - Esquire
A nuanced, richly rewarding tale - Mail on Sunday
A very enjoyable book with characters that you feel you could have met at some point they are so real! Having grown up the 70/80's London the setting is very accurate too. Truth and lies, dysfunctional family;... More
The story involves a narrator who never gives her name and her childhood friend Tracy – two mixed-race girls who want to be dancers. Only Tracy, however, has any talent. The narrator drops out of university to become... More
Thanks so much to Hamish Hamilton and NetGalley for making review copies of this book available to booksellers.
I've seen this novel described in several places as a book about friendship, but I find that...
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