Shortlisted for the Best of the Orange Best 2010 by the Orange Prize Youth Panel.
Winner of the Orange Prize for Fiction 2006.
Set on both sides of the Atlantic, award-winning Zadie Smith's third novel, On Beauty,
is a brilliant analysis of family life, the institution of marriage,
intersections of the personal and political, and an honest look at
people's deceptions. It is also, as you might expect, very funny indeed.
Set in New England mainly and London partly, On Beauty concerns a pair of feuding families - the Belseys and the Kipps - and a clutch of doomed affairs. It puts low morals among high ideals and asks some searching questions about what life does to love. For the Belseys and the Kipps, the confusions - both personal and political - of our uncertain age are about to be brought close to home: right to the heart of family.
Zadie Smith was born in north-west London in 1975, and continues to
live in the area. White Teeth, her first novel, has won awards for
Best Book and Best Female Newcomer at the BT Emma Awards (Ethnic and
Multicultural Media Awards), the Guardian First Book Award, the
Whitbread Prize for a first novel in 2000, the James Tait Black
Memorial Prize for fiction 2000, the WH Smith Book Award for New
Talent, the Frankfurt eBook Award for Best Fiction Work Originally
Published in 2000 and both the Commonwealth Writers First Book Award
and Overall Commonwealth Writers Prize.
