Where to start with Zadie Smith: a guide to her best books

Zadie Smith has been nominated for the Booker Prize three times, and has appeared on Granta’s list of the Best of Young British Novelists not once, but twice. She has been hailed as the voice of a generation, a modern-day Charles Dickens and an astute chronicler of our times. It’s fair to say she has literary chops.

Smith’s fiction is full of great dialogue, snappy observations, and a love for London, the city where she spent her formative years. She grew up in a working-class family to an English father and a Jamaican mother, and her work is often concerned with class and race, as well as complex family dynamics.

From the UK to America and Africa, and sometimes beyond, Smith’s novels take readers to the heart of her characters’ daily lives, often focusing on small dramas that have big consequences. Her work also distills broader societal preoccupations, capturing, or even sometimes predicting, moments of reckoning.

And it’s not just fiction where Smith shines; her essays and interviews are as incisive as her novels. But if you want to experience the best of Smith as a writer, it’s her novels that are essential reading. Here, we look at six of her best. 

The legend of how White Teeth came to be is almost as famous as the book itself. Smith began writing her debut novel while studying English literature at King’s College, Cambridge. Aged 21, she submitted around 80 pages of the book to a literary agent – most novice writers will need to submit a whole novel before a publisher will even consider opening their chequebook. But not in this case. The opening chapters sparked a frenzied bidding war among publishers, and Smith secured a substantial deal with Hamish Hamilton, which has been her UK publisher ever since.

White Teeth was published in 2000 to mostly rave reviews (and a few stinkers: the hype was quickly followed by the backlash), as well as numerous accolades, including the Whitbread Book Award in the first novel category, the Guardian First Book Award and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. 

The book is set in Willesden in northwest London and tells the story of friends Archie Jones, a white Englishman, and Samad Iqbal, a Bengali Muslim, who meet during the Second World War. Covering around 50 years and moving back and forth in time, the novel deals with their trials and tribulations of the two men and their families, set against the ever-changing experience of immigrants in Britain.

With a large cast of characters from all walks of life and a timely, satirical critique of race and class, the novel garnered comparisons with Charles Dickens – which have persisted throughout her career (see The Fraud, below).

White Teeth contains many of the elements that would go on to become hallmarks of Smith’s fiction: a London setting, multiple perspectives, a playful writing style that nonetheless tackles big issues like race and colonialism, a focus on working-class lives, and a spanning of time that looks at how people and society change – or don’t – over the years.

Released in 2016, and longlisted for the Booker Prize the following year, Swing Time spans years and locations, but at its core is about home, belonging and an intimate relationship.

The novel largely follows two mixed-race girls who grow up on housing estates in London with dreams of becoming dancers. The unnamed narrator has the drive to leave her old world behind, but it’s her friend Tracey that has the raw talent. The pair maintain a complicated friendship throughout their childhood, which ends abruptly in their early 20s.

But this is a Zadie Smith novel, and the past is never the past. Both cannot quite let go, and are unable to forget each other, even as they move on with their lives: Tracey becomes a West End dancer while the narrator goes to work for Aimee, a Madonna-like mega-celebrity who wants to open a school for girls in the Gambia (cue an exploration of the familiar Smith themes of class and privilege). 

For both the main characters, and for Smith, music is very important; it’s something that infuses much of her writing – fiction (see The Autograph Man, below) and non-fiction – whether she’s discussing music directly or just dropping in tidbits about the soundtracks to her characters’ lives. It’s music that gives Swing Time its rhythm and propulsion.

The Guardian called Swing Time ‘a best friend bildungsroman in the Elena Ferrante mould’, while Smith admitted that the book came closest to what she had been trying to do for a long time: ‘I wanted to express something about how it is to be in the world as a black woman,’ she said.

Smith has interviewed and written about some of the most famous musicians in the world, from rappers Jay-Z and Eminem to singers Billie Holiday and Joni Mitchell. And as well as music, fame is a subject that has long fascinated her.

She brought that fascination to bear in her second novel The Autograph Man, which looks at our obsession with celebrity and pop culture. It was perhaps an apt topic for Smith to touch on after White Teeth, given how quickly she became famous because of that book – a literary rock star almost – and the expectations that followed.

Longlisted for the Booker in 2002, The Autograph Man centres on Alex-Li Tandem, a Chinese Jewish autograph trader who for 13 years has been trying to get the autograph of reclusive 1950s starlet Kitty Alexander. In Alex’s quest, and in this story about fame, Smith forces us all – characters and readers alike – to examine who we really are, and our misconceptions about our idols and ourselves.

Second novels (like second albums) are difficult things. The pressure to create something better than what came before, usually in a much tighter time frame, can be immense; but with The Autograph Man, Smith withstood that pressure. As with White Teeth, reviews were not unanimously favourable, but plenty saw the book as a more than worthy follow-up to her debut. As Alex Clark wrote in the Guardian: ‘Has she fulfilled the promise of White Teeth? I think she’s exceeded it; but there’s more to come.’