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Zadie Smith has written six novels — White Teeth, The Autograph Man, On Beauty, NW, Swing Time, and The Fraud — and two essay collections, Changing My Mind and Feel Free. She sold White Teeth on the basis of an early draft while still a student at Cambridge and published it at 24 to near-universal acclaim. That kind of entrance creates expectations few writers survive; she has not only survived them but kept changing, from the exuberant multigenerational comedy of her debut to the formal precision of NW, the sharp Victorian ironies of The Fraud, and the essays in Feel Free that are among the most honest criticism written in English today.
By Lisanne Swart · 8 books · Literary Fiction & Essays · Literary Fiction · British Novels · Essay Collections · Authors Like Zadie Smith · Updated August 2026
NovelStart here
White Teeth
Two families — the Joneses and the Iqbals — bound together by a shared moment in the Second World War, raising children in the overlapping communities of Willesden, North London. Across three generations, Smith traces how the legacies of empire, migration, faith, and coincidence shape people who are simply trying to build ordinary lives in a world that keeps reminding them their past is not finished with them.
The most exuberant, ambitious debut novel published in Britain in decades — funny, sad, and structurally more controlled than its energy suggests. Nothing quite prepares you for how much it contains. I finished it in two sittings and spent a week thinking about the last fifty pages.
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Novel
The Autograph Man
Alex-Li Tandem, a mixed-race Jewish-Chinese autograph dealer in London, becomes obsessed with obtaining the signature of a reclusive Hollywood actress. A novel about celebrity, grief, Kabbalah, and the way people project their own needs onto those they have never met.
Her most divisive book — some find its pop-culture saturation exhausting, others find it her most genuinely strange. I am in the second camp. Worth reading after White Teeth once you have a sense of her range.
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NovelHighly recommended
On Beauty
Two rival families — one liberal, one conservative — collide at a fictional New England university when a son from each family falls in love with the other’s daughter. A novel about marriage, art, beauty, politics, and what happens when the values people hold publicly come into direct conflict with what they actually do.
Formally tighter than White Teeth and psychologically more precise. The portrait of a long marriage in slow deterioration is some of her most accurate writing — I found it more unsettling than her debut precisely because it is quieter. Loosely based on E.M. Forster’s Howards End — you do not need to have read it, but it rewards the comparison.
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Novel
NW
Four people who grew up on the same North London council estate take radically different paths into adulthood. Leah stays; Natalie reinvents herself entirely. NW follows them in a fragmented, formally experimental style that mirrors the way the city moves — in cuts, overlaps, and missed connections.
Her most formally adventurous novel and the one that has aged best. If White Teeth is about roots, NW is about what happens when you try to cut them. Harder to enter than her earlier books but worth the effort — the last third is devastating. I read it twice before I felt I had understood it, and both readings were worth the time.
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NovelHighly recommended
Swing Time
Two mixed-race girls meet at a dance class in North London in the 1980s and form a friendship shaped by competing ambitions and unequal talent. One becomes a global pop star’s personal assistant; one does not. The novel moves between their childhood and adult lives across three continents, asking what we owe people we started alongside when our paths diverge.
Her most emotionally controlled novel and, for my money, her most fully achieved — the one I recommend most immediately to readers who ask me where to begin. The narrator is unreliable in the most interesting way, not because she lies but because she refuses to understand herself. The sections on dance, talent, and what it means to want something you cannot have are extraordinary.
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Essays
Changing My Mind
An earlier essay collection covering literature, film, family, and her own writing process, ranging from close readings of Kafka and Nabokov to a personal account of her father. It shows her critical voice forming before Feel Free extended it further.
Less wide-ranging than Feel Free but useful if you want to see her critical voice develop — several essays here anticipate arguments she returns to and sharpens later.
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EssaysCore book
Feel Free
Thirty essays on everything from Joni Mitchell to Justin Bieber, from Brexit to Kafka, from her own writing process to what social media is doing to the self. The range is characteristic — Smith has never been interested in staying in one lane — but the underlying question across all of them is the same: how do we think clearly about the world we are actually living in.
Start here before her fiction if you want to understand how her mind works. The essay on joy, the one on Keats, and the one on her father are the best things she has written. I reread the essay on joy every year — it is one of the few pieces of writing that has actually changed how I think about what I want from my life.
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Novel
The Fraud
Victorian England. Eliza Touchet, a Scottish widow and housekeeper to the once-popular novelist William Harrison Ainsworth, becomes absorbed in the Tichborne Claimant case — a sensational legal trial in which a working-class butcher from Australia claims to be the long-lost heir to a baronetcy. The case obsesses the country. Eliza, watching from the edges of literary society, wants to understand why.
A departure in setting but completely recognisable as Smith — same precision, same interest in how class and power shape who gets to be believed. The Tichborne case is one of the strangest true stories in Victorian history, and she finds exactly the right angle on it. Her funniest book since White Teeth and her most politically serious since NW.
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Where to start with Zadie Smith
If you have never read her
→ Start with White Teeth. It is her most ambitious and energetic book, and the one that best shows what she can do at full stretch.
If you want her most emotionally precise work
→ Swing Time. Her most controlled novel, and the one that has stayed with me longest.
If you want to understand how she thinks before committing to her fiction
→ Feel Free. The essays show her mind working in real time and are the best entry point for readers who are unsure.
If you want her most formally adventurous work
→ NW. Harder to enter but the most original thing she has written.
If Victorian fiction is your entry point
→ The Fraud. Her most recent novel and her funniest since White Teeth.
Frequently asked questions about Zadie Smith
Waterstones Podcast: Zadie Smith on twenty-three years of writing since White Teeth.
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Reading list
Authors Like Zadie Smith
Where to go next if you loved her voice.
Author Guide
Zadie Smith: Full Author Profile
Her life, her voice, and how she keeps reinventing the novel.
Author Index
Every Author Guide, A–Z
The full alphabetical directory, if you want to keep browsing.
On my shelf
My Bookshelf — Book Recommendations
Every book I have personally reviewed, in one place.
