NW
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4.3 • 3 Ratings
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- $10.99
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
Twenty-first century London: rich and poor, black and white, joyful and melancholy, boring and deviant—occasionally lethal.Somewhere in the northwest of the city stands the Caldwell housing estate, a relic of ’70s urban planning. Leah, an administrator for the lottery, grew up there. So did her best friend, Natalie, now a barrister, and Felix, an MG car mechanic.Thirty years later these Caldwell kids and their partners live only a few streets apart, yet inhabit separate worlds. Until the day a desperate local woman comes to Leah’s door seeking help—and forces Leah out of her isolation. But is Shar a stranger or a friend? Sincere or a fraud? A connection to the past or a threat to the future?From private dinner tables to public parks, at work and at play, in this delicate but devastating novel of encounters Zadie Smith’s Londoners find themselves navigating an increasingly atomized society. For some the city remains a place of happy accidents and chance good fortune, while for others it is darker terrain in which the main streets hide the back alleys, and taking the high road can sometimes lead to a dead end. NW brilliantly depicts this modern urban zone—familiar to city dwellers everywhere—in a tragicomic novel as mercurial as the city itself.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The reader first meets Leah Hanwell at her most vulnerable (some might say gullible): at home, when the doorbell rings and in tumbles a desperate, unknown but not unfamiliar woman, pleading for money, which Leah provides. Although this incident soon fades into an awkward anecdote shared later at awkward gatherings, it introduces the framework of Smith's (White Teeth) excellent and captivating new novel, in which the lines dividing neighbors from strangers are not always clear or permanent. The book takes place in NW London, where characters intersect and circumvent one another's lives and, in the process, expose their ethnic distinctions and class transformations, their relationships and their secrets. Leah's childhood best friend Natalie Blake (formerly Keisha Blake) eventually becomes the primary focus and the contrast between the two women allows for some of the book's most compelling insights, namely the inevitability of vs. the disinterest in becoming a mother, which Natalie has done and Leah decisively has not. The book's middle section introduces Felix Cooper, a friend of neither woman, but whose fate will affect them both. Smith's masterful ability to suspend all these bits and parts in the amber which is London refracts light, history, and the humane beauty of seeing everything at once.
