Author(s): Zadie Smith

Fiction | Staff Favourites

Zadie Smith's brilliant tragi-comic NW follows four Londoners - Leah, Natalie, Felix and Nathan - after they've left their childhood council estate, grown up and moved on to different lives. From private houses to public parks, at work and at play, their city is brutal, beautiful and complicated. Yet 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. A portrait of modern urban life, NW is funny, sad and urgent - as brimming with vitality as the city itself. 

Zadie Smith has a most wonderful talent for creating believably flawed characters. In NW she also brings to life the jostled, uneven and sometimes desperate world of Willesden, in north west London. Leah, Natalie, Felix and Nathan have all managed to move away from their childhoods on a council estate but they all find that, sometimes, just when you think you’ve escaped your past, it calls you back. ->CAROLINE