Zadie Smith

How did George Eliot's love life affect her prose? Why did Kafka write at three in the morning? In what ways is Barack Obama like Eliza Doolittle? Can you be over-dressed for the Oscars? What is Italian Feminism? If Roland Barthes killed the Author, can Nabokov revive him? What does 'soulful' mean? Is Date Movie the worst film ever made?

1873. Mrs Eliza Touchet is the Scottish housekeeper - and cousin by marriage - of a once famous novelist, now in decline. Mrs Touchet is a woman of many interests, but she is also sceptical.

Andrew Bogle meanwhile grew up enslaved on the Hope Plantation, Jamaica. He knows every lump of sugar comes at a human cost. That the rich deceive the poor. And that people are more easily manipulated than they realise. When Bogle finds himself in London, star witness in a celebrated case of imposture, he knows his future depends on telling the right story.

Mrs Touchet is a woman of the world. Mr Bogle is no fool. But in a world of hypocrisy and self-deception, deciding what is real proves a complicated task... 

Interleaving 10 new and unpublished stories with some of her best-loved pieces from the New Yorker, Zadie Smith, presents a rich and varied collection of fiction. Moving across genres and perspectives, from the historic to the vividly current to the slyly dystopian, this is a sharply alert and prescient collection about time and place, identity and rebirth, the persistent legacies that haunt our present selves and the uncanny futures that rush up to meet us.

Deeply personal and powerfully moving, this is a short and timely series of essays on the experience of lockdown, by one of the most clear-sighted and essential writers of our time. Suffused with a profound intimacy and tenderness in response to these unprecedented times, Intimations is a vital work of art, a gesture of connection and an act of love - an essential book in extraordinary times.

Four Londoners - Leah, Natalie, Felix and Nathan - have left their childhood council estate, grown up and moved on to different lives. 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. Contains some explicit sexual scenes.

Why do we fall in love with the people we do? Why do we visit our mistakes on our children? What makes life truly beautiful?Set between New England and London, On Beauty concerns a pair of feuding families - the Belseys and the Kipps - and a clutch of doomed affairs. It puts low morals among high ideals and asks some searching questions about what life does to love. For the Belseys and the Kipps, the confusions - both personal and political - of our uncertain age are about to be brought close to home: right to the heart of family.

Two brown girls dream of being dancers - but only one, Tracey, has talent. The other has ideas: about rhythm and time, about black bodies and black music, what constitutes a tribe or makes a person truly free. It's a close but complicated childhood friendship that ends abruptly in their early 20s, never to be revisited but never quite forgotten, either....

Meet Maud: a guinea pig who inexplicably wears a judo suit - and not everyone understands or approves. When Maud is thrown into a new and confusing situation, it takes brave decisions and serendipitous encounters for her to find her place and embrace her individuality.

This is the story of two North London families, one headed by Archie, the other by Muslim Bengali, Samad Iqbal. Pals since they served together in World War II, the riotous and tortured histories of the families are intertwined, capturing an empire's worth of cultural identity, history, and hope.