Writer Zadie Smith burst onto the literary scene with her first novel White Teeth more than a decade ago. Set in the Northwest London neighborhood where she grew up, White Teeth captured the diverse, vibrant rhythms of a city in transition. Smith returns to the neighborhood in her new novel, NW, but this is a sobering homecoming.
Smith’s mischievous sense of humor is still on full display in NW as is her playful love of language. But this is an older, perhaps wiser, writer than the young woman who dazzled readers with her first book. Where White Teeth was a wild ride into a whole new world, NW is a more complex exploration of where the inhabitants of that world have landed.
Smith says her decision to return to her old haunts for the setting of this novel was, in part, purely pragmatic. “I knew I was going to write a book which was in some ways difficult stylistically and difficult for me to write, so I just wanted to give myself a break,” she says. “I needed one thing which was stable that I knew — and the streets I do know and they don’t take research and I don’t need to use Google maps; they’re kind of a deep knowledge in me.”
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