Reading Rocks!

Zadie Smith's On Beauty

I have just started reading On Beauty by Zadie Smith, so I have little ground for forming an opinion. In the mean-time I will judge the book by its cover: I love it!

Zadie Smith is one of the literary world's most talked about authors. At the age of 25, her first novel White Teeth was published and immediately achieved critical and commercial success. Since then, Smith has written The Autograph Man (2002) and most recently On Beauty (2005). She's a Man Booker nominee and Orange Prize winner.

SYNOPSIS
Why do we fall in love with the people we do?
Why do we visit our mistakes on our children?
What makes life truly beautiful?

Set in New England mainly and London partly, On Beauty concerns a pair of feuding families—the Belseys and the Kippses—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 Kippses, the confusions—both personal and political—of our uncertain age are about to be brought close to home: right to the heart of family.

ACCOLADES
"...Ms. Smith possesses a captivating authorial voice - at once authoritative and nonchalant, and capacious enough to accommodate high moral seriousness, laid-back humor and virtually everything in between - and in these pages, she uses that voice to enormous effect, giving us that rare thing: a novel that is as affecting as it is entertaining, as provocative as it is humane." -- The New York Times

posted by MJ @ 2:45 p.m.