Grand Union

The first ever collection of stories from the bestselling and beloved author of Swing Time and White Teeth

In the summer of 1959, an Antiguan immigrant in north-west London lives the last day of his life.

A mother looks back on her early forays into matters of the human heart, considering the destructive nature of desire.

A disgraced cop stands amid the broken shards of his life, unable to move forward into a future that holds no place for him.

A teenager chases spectres through 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 endless, while political and environmental collapse happen far away to someone else.

Zadie Smith presents a sharply alert and slyly 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.

About the Author

Zadie Smith is the author of the novels White Teeth, The Autograph Man, On Beauty and NW, as well as The Embassy of Cambodia and a collection of essays, Changing My Mind.

She is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and has twice been listed as one of Granta's 20 Best Young British Novelists.

She has won the Orange Prize for Fiction, the Whitbread First Novel Award and the Guardian First Book Award among many others, and been shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction.

Zadie Smith lives in London and New York with her husband and two children. Swing Time is her fifth novel.