Grand Union

The first ever collection of stories from the Man Booker Prize-shortlisted author of Swing Time and White Teeth `Zadie Smith is the best writer of our generation` Gary Shteyngart `Her dialogue is pitch-perfect, her comic timing masterful... [And] she also delivers a sophisticated commentary on race, gender, class, celebrity and power` Telegraph on Swing Time `Smith is virtuosic, as ever, on family and friendship, and her ability to write about large-scale social injustice without losing her neutral novelist`s gaze is breathtaking` Times Literary Supplement on Swing Time In the summer of 1959, an Antiguan immigrant in north west London lives the last day of his life, unknowingly caught in someone else`s story of hate and division, resistance and revolt. A mother looks back on her early forays into matters of the human heart - and other parts of the human body - considering the ways in which desire is always an act of negotiation, destruction, and self-invention. A disgraced cop stands amid the broken shards of his life, unable to move forward into a future that holds no place for him. Moral panic spreads like contagion through the upper echelons of New York City - and the cancelled people look disconcertingly like the rest of us. A teenage scion of the technocratic elite chases spectres through a premium virtual reality, trailed by a little girl with a runny nose and no surviving family. We all take a much-needed break from this mess, on a package holiday where the pool`s electric blue is ceaselessly replenished, while political and environmental collapse happen far away, to someone else. Interleaving ten completely new and unpublished stories with some of her best-loved pieces from the New Yorker and elsewhere, Zadie Smith presents a dizzyingly rich and varied collection of fiction. Moving exhilaratingly across genres and perspectives, from the historic to the vividly current to the slyly dystopian, Grand Union is a sharply alert and prescient collection about time and place, identity and rebirth, the persistent legacies that haunt our present selves and the uncanny futures that rush up to meet us.