The Autograph Man

'Superb. One of the most entertaining novels you'll read this year' Times Literary Supplement How do we become who we are? Can we ever truly escape our origins? Must we dance to the music of our time? Set in London, New York and West Africa, Swing Time is about two brown girls from Willesden who dram of being dancers. Only one - Tracey - has talent. But the other has ideas which take her further than she could ever imagined. It is a story of finding happiness in the meanest of...

From the best-selling author of Cosmopolitanism comes this revealing exploration of how the collective identities that shape our polarised world are riddled with contradiction. We often think identity is personal. But the identities that shape the world, our struggles, and our hopes, are social ones, shared with countless others. Our sense of self is shaped by our family, but also by affiliations that spread out from there, like our nationality, culture, class, race and religion. Taking these...

When Ballard, our narrator, smashes his car into another and watches a man die in front of him, his sense of sexual possibilities in the world around him becomes detached. As he begins an affair with the dead man's wife, he finds himself drawn with increasing intensity to the mangled impacts of car crashes. Then he encounters Robert Vaughan, a former TV scientist turned nightmare angel of the expressway, who has gathered around him a collection of alienated crash victims and experiments with a...

Interleaving ten completely new and unpublished stories with some of her best-loved pieces from the New Yorker and elsewhere, Zadie Smith presents a dizzyingly rich and varied collection of fiction. Moving exhilaratingly across genres and perspectives, from the historic to the vividly current to the slyly dystopian, Grand Union 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...

Published in the first month of the first year of the new century, Zadie Smith's debut novel White Teeth - winner of the Guardian First Book Award and the Whitbread First Novel Award - was an immediate bestseller and stunningly acclaimed. One of the most talked about fictional dйbuts of ever, White Teeth is a funny, generous, big-hearted novel, adored by critics and readers alike. Dealing - among many other things - with friendship, love, war, three cultures and three families over three...

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. The charming characters of Magenta Fox, whose work is evocative of Raymond Briggs and Janet Ahlberg, perfectly offset Zadie and Nick's warm, wry prose. Weirdo is an endearing story about the quiet power of being different...