Zadie Smith Books in Order

On New Year's Day 1975, Archie Jones gets a second chance, and his friendship with Samad Iqbal opens into a sprawling portrait of two London families. Funny, busy, and sharp, it tracks race, religion, history, and the chaos of ordinary life.

Alex-Li Tandem makes his living buying and selling celebrity signatures while chasing a near-mythic autograph of a forgotten film star. The novel is funny and melancholy at once, mixing fame, grief, faith, and the fear of growing up.

This short collection pairs two stories about damaged, hard-to-read people moving through grief, dislocation, and ordinary unease. Small in size but unsettling in effect, it shows Smith testing the short story form from two very different angles.

An interracial family in a Massachusetts college town gets caught in academic feuds, marital trouble, generational tension, and political posturing. Funny and piercing, the novel turns the culture wars into a deeply human family mess.

Split between personal pieces and literary criticism, these essays move through reading, memory, film, art, and family life. It's a lively record of Smith thinking on the page, testing ideas rather than pretending to have finished answers.

This essay collection brings together writers, critics, and researchers, including Winterson, to argue for the value of reading. The pieces explore pleasure, attention, access to books, and the way stories can change a life.

Leah, Natalie, Felix, and Nathan grow up on the same north-west London estate, but adulthood pulls them down very different roads. Smith turns their intersecting lives into a sharp, intimate novel about class, identity, friendship, and the city.

A multi-author celebration of public libraries, bringing together essays, memoirs, history, and fiction. Its contributors consider the roles libraries play in personal lives, communities, imagination, and the future of access to books.

Fatou, an immigrant domestic worker living in Willesden, measures her days between small freedoms and quiet forms of control. This novella turns a local badminton court and a distant embassy into a story about labor, loneliness, and belonging.

Two girls in northwest London bond over dance, then grow into very different women. Moving from childhood friendship to celebrity, money, and global charity work, the novel asks what art can save and what inequality quietly distorts.

This essay collection ranges from libraries, movies, and music to politics, technology, and climate change. Smith moves easily between the personal and the public, turning ordinary subjects into sharp, restless thinking.

Smith's first full short story collection moves from realism to satire to something stranger, with characters spread across different cities, eras, and moods. The stories are varied, witty, and alert to the pressure of modern life.

Written during the first months of lockdown, these brief essays think through time, suffering, work, isolation, and the strange shape of everyday life in crisis. It's a slim, searching book about how people live with uncertainty.

In a Kilburn pub, Alvita, a Jamaican-born British woman in her fifties, tells the story of her five marriages in language that is funny, earthy, and cutting. Smith reworks Chaucer into a modern monologue about sex, power, and survival.

Maud is a judo-suit-wearing guinea pig who stands out wherever she goes. When a confusing new situation makes her feel even stranger, she has to learn that being different can be its own kind of strength.

Maud, a guinea pig who always wears a judo suit, feels out of place when the world treats her oddness as a problem. This warm picture book follows her toward friendship, confidence, and the pleasure of being herself.

Set around the Tichborne trial, Smith's first historical novel follows Eliza Touchet as Victorian England argues about truth, class, race, and inheritance. The story stretches from London drawing rooms to Jamaica, asking who gets to tell the past.

These essays move through art, film, politics, city life, and grief, with pieces on figures such as Joan Didion, Toni Morrison, and Martin Amis. Smith looks hard at what stays vivid in culture, and what it means to remain human now.

Maud, the judo-suit-wearing guinea pig, sneaks along on Kit's outdoor adventure and finds the wild a little scary too. This cheerful picture book turns camping nerves into a story about bravery, friendship, and being yourself.