LITERARY FICTION

BY STEPHANIE CROSS

NW

by Zadie Smith (Hamish Hamilton £18.99 % £16.99)

INEXPLICABLY overlooked by this year’s prize juries, NW was not only Zadie Smith’s most ambitious novel to date, it was also her best.

Was Smith penalised for her refusal to write White Teeth Part 2? Perhaps — for, though NW marked her return to the London environs that inspired her 2000 blockbusting comic debut, it was a very different animal: restless and disturbing.

This may make it sound like an ordeal, but nothing could be further from the truth: Smith’s tale of four thirtysomethings, linked by geography and separated by virtually everything else, is frequently electrifying — thanks not least to Smith’s unsurpassed gift for zinging, pitchperfect dialogue — and also darkly, painfully funny.

As much as anything, NW is concerned with time (or ‘ time as a relative experience’, as one character has it) and this indelible snapshot of how we live now will be, for me, easily 2012’s most enduring book.

THE FORRESTS

by Emily Perkins (Bloomsbury Circus, £12.99

% £11.49)

ALL HAPPY families are alike . . . but in fiction it’s the dysfunctional clans that blur into one. The Forrests, however, are a pretty distinctive lot, relocating from New York to New Zealand so their petulant head, Frank, can pursue his theatre career.

Meanwhile, sisters Evelyn and Dorothy get on with growing up, having families — Perkins is superb on motherhood — and, in Dorothy’s case, nursing an unrequited, lifelong passion for drifter Daniel.

Perkins’s novel gets off to a slightly shaky start and its leaps of time and place can be disconcerting, but before long her extraordinarily sensual, ultraclose-up prose starts to take effect.

In Middlemarch, George Eliot suggested that life would be unbearable if we were sensitive enough to hear even the grass as it grew.

This luminous, deeply moving novel leaves you convinced, and marvelling instead in wonder, that Perkins has just that ability.