Zadie Smith’s Jazzy London Tale Has Traders, Do-Gooders: Books
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Restlessness defines “NW,” Zadie Smith’s fourth novel, an intimate tale of social mobility in 21st-century London that jives to the city’s jangly beat.
Told in prose that ranges from the staccato to the sonorous, the book centers on a multiracial quartet of 30-somethings, two women and two men who grew up on the same crummy council estate in London’s northwestern neighborhood of Kilburn. It’s Smith’s own home turf and also provided the setting for her breakthrough debut, “White Teeth.”