Dazzlingly energetic and deeply human, Swing Time is 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.

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 twenties, never to be revisited, but never quite forgotten, either.

Review
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)

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)

[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... 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)

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

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 and the unjustness of the world... interwoven with another beautiful story of the dances people do to rise above it all (Economist)

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

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

A nuanced, richly rewarding tale (Mail on Sunday)

Zadie Smith is the author of the novels White Teeth, The Autograph Man, On Beauty and NW, as well as The Embassy of Cambodia and a collection of essays, Changing My Mind. She is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and has twice been listed as one of Granta's 20 Best Young British Novelists. She has won the Orange Prize for Fiction, the Whitbread First Novel Award and the Guardian First Book Award among many others and been shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction. Zadie Smith lives in London and New York with her husband and two children. Swing Time is her fifth novel.