Alert! Penguin Random House has announced that it will be publishing novels from both Ali Smith and Zadie Smith this year, The Bookseller reports.
The publishing house made the announcement at its conference in Birmingham, England yesterday. Both novels will be released under PRH imprint Hamish Hamilton.
The utterly glorious Zadie Smith brings down the house with the news of novel SWING TIME coming autumn 2016 #PRH2016 pic.twitter.com/uQrg9FY3cQ
— Hermione Thompson (@HermThompson) February 25, 2016
The books will be published in August 2016 in the UK.
Zadie Smith’s new novel, set in North West London and West Africa, is called Swing Time, and was described as “a story about friendship and music and stubborn roots”.
About Swing Time:
An ambitious, exuberant new novel moving from north west London to West Africa, from the multi-award-winning author of White Teeth and On Beauty
Two brown girls dream of being dancers – but only one, Tracey, has talent. The other has ideas: about rhythm and time, about black bodies and black music, what constitutes a tribe, or makes a person truly free. It’s a close but complicated childhood friendship that ends abruptly in their early twenties, never to be revisited, but never quite forgotten, either…
Dazzlingly energetic and deeply human, Swing Time is a story about friendship and music and stubborn roots, about how we are shaped by these things and how we can survive them. Moving from North-West London to West Africa, it is an exuberant dance to the music of time.
Ali Smith’s new book is titled Autumn, and is the first in a four-book “shape-shifting” series, named Seasonal.
About Autumn:
A breathtakingly inventive new novel from the Man Booker-shortlisted and Baileys Prize-winning author of How to be both
Fusing Keatsian mists and mellow fruitfulness with the vitality, the immediacy and the colour-hit of Pop Art – via a bit of very contemporary skulduggery and skull-diggery – Autumn is a witty excavation of the present by the past. The novel is a stripped-branches take on popular culture, and a meditation, in a world growing ever more bordered and exclusive, on what richness and worth are, what harvest means.
Autumn is the first installment in Ali Smith’s novel quartet Seasonal: four standalone books, separate yet interconnected and cyclical (as the seasons are), exploring what time is, how we experience it, and the recurring markers in the shapes our lives take and in our ways with narrative.
From the imagination of the peerless Ali Smith comes a shape-shifting series, wide-ranging in timescale and light-footed through histories, and a story about ageing and time and love and stories themselves.