"Zadie Smith’s On Beauty broke my heart in a multitude of beautifully written ways. Smith tells the story of a family living in Boston, Massachusetts: an academic and white, English father, a healthcare professional and black, American mother, and their three radically different children. All must navigate their overlapping battles throughout the book, ranging from petty office disputes to questions of racial identity. Smith is an expert at evoking visceral emotions from her audience and therefore made this one of the most brutal yet important works I read in my time in university. Lovely."
Publisher Penguin Books
Publication Date 2006-08-29
Section Fiction / All Staff Suggestions / Fiction Suggestions / Summer P.
Format Paperback
ISBN 9780143037743
On Beauty (winner of the 2006 Orange Prize for fiction) is the story of an interracial family living in the university town of Wellington, Massachusetts, whose misadventures in the culture wars—on both sides of the Atlantic—serve to skewer everything from family life to political correctness to the combustive collision between the personal and the political.
"A thoroughly original tale. . . . Wonderfully engaging, wonderfully observed. . . . That rare thing: a novel that is as affecting as it is entertaining, as provocative as it is humane." —Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
"A thing of beauty. Oh happy day when a writer as gifted as Zadie Smith fulfills her early promise with a novel as accomplished, substantive and penetrating as On Beauty." —The Los Angeles Times
"Smith's specialty is her ability to render the new world, in its vibrant multiculturalism, with a kind of dancing, daring joy. . . . Her plots and people sing with life. . . . One of the best of the year, a splendid treat. " —Chicago Tribune
"Short-listed for [the 2005] Man Booker Prize, On Beauty is a rollicking satire. . . . A tremendously good read." —San Francisco Chronicle
