It is a story about music and identity, race and class, those who follow the dance and those who lead it. It's a close but complicated childhood friendship that ends abruptly in their early twenties, never to be revisited, but never quite forgotten either.īursting with energy, rhythm and movement, Swing Time is Zadie Smith's most ambitious novel yet. The other has ideas: about rhythm and time, black bodies and black music, what it means to belong, what it means to be free. Two brown girls dream of being dancers - but only one, Tracey, has talent. Extraordinary, truly marvellous' ObserverĪ dazzlingly exuberant novel moving from north west London to West Africa, from the critically acclaimed author of White Teeth, On Beauty and Grand Union Published by Penguin Canada.SHORTLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARDS 2017 She pulled my great frizz back into a single cloud, tied with a black band.įrom Swing Time by Zadie Smith ©2016. Apocalyptic Swing (2009), and The Last Time I Saw Amelia Earhart (2005).

Two young black girls grow up in the same low income project in North London, both interested in dance, only one actually good at it. Satin yellow bows were a phenomenon unknown to my mother. Gabrielle Calvocoressi is the author of Rocket Fantastic (2018), winner of the Audre Lorde Prize for Lesbian Poetry, Apocalyptic Swing (2009), and The Last Time I Saw Amelia Earhart (2005). An Amazon Best Book of November 2016: In Swing Time, Zadie Smith handles race, class, and long-term friendship with grace and apparent ease. She had spiral curls, they reached to her backside and were gathered into two long plaits, glossy with some kind of oil tied at their ends with satin yellow bows. Cute, but also obscene: her nostrils were on permanent display. Tracey's face was perky and round, she looked like a darker Shirley Temple, except her nose was as problematic as mine, I could see that much at once, a ridiculous nose - it went straught up in the air like a little piglet. But my face was ponderous and melancholy, with a long, serious nose, and my eyes turned down, as did my mouth.

Our shade of brown was exactly the same - as if one piece of tan material had been cut to make us both - and our freckles gathered in the same areas, we were of the same height. There were many other girls present but for obvious reasons we noticed each other, the similarities and the differences, as girls will. on that Saturday, walking through the sandy gravel of a churchyard, each holding our mother's hand. If all the Saturdays of 1982 can be thought of as one day, I met Tracey at ten a.m.

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