NW
by Zadie Smith
Summary
NW follows four Londoners who grew up together on the Caldwell council estate in the northwest of the city and have since scattered into very different lives. Leah Hanwell, a social worker married to a French Algerian hairdresser named Michel, is stalled in adulthood, quietly refusing motherhood and unraveled by a former classmate, Shar, who cons her out of cab fare and turns out to be a repeat offender. Felix Cooper, a recovering addict rebuilding his life with a new girlfriend, spends a hopeful day buying a car and saying goodbye to an old lover, only to be robbed and stabbed to death on his way home by two men who want the earrings his girlfriend gave him. Natalie Blake, born Keisha, has become a successful barrister with a banker husband and every visible marker of having escaped the estate, yet feels hollowed out by the distance between the woman she has built and the girl she used to be, and starts arranging anonymous sexual encounters online that eventually blow up her marriage in public, during the chaos of the Notting Hill Carnival. Nathan Bogle, once a promising young footballer, has become a homeless addict connected, it turns out, to Felix's killer, and it is Nathan who finds Natalie wandering the streets after her breakdown and talks her down from a bridge. The novel closes with Leah and Natalie, shaken by everything around them, reporting what Nathan knows about Felix's death to the police, then returning, uneasily, to the lives they were already living before any of it happened.
Smith gives each character a different narrative form to match how they experience their own lives: Natalie's chapters break into hundreds of short numbered fragments, reflecting her controlled, achievement driven mind, while Leah's drift in loose stream of consciousness, and Nathan is never given interior narration at all, a deliberate choice that keeps him a stranger even to a reader following his story closely. The shifting styles make NW genuinely difficult to settle into, closer to Woolf or Joyce than to the more straightforward realism of Smith's earlier novels, and that difficulty is clearly the point rather than an accident.
Historical Context & Significance
NW arrived in 2012 as one of the most anticipated novels of the year, and its prize record fell short of that anticipation. It did not make the Man Booker Prize's 2012 longlist, which passed over several established names in favor of a field the judges praised for linguistic innovation. The following year it was nominated for the Women's Prize for Fiction, without advancing to a win. Critics were considerably warmer than the juries: James Wood, in the New Yorker, had criticized Smith's earlier fiction for what he called hysterical realism, and reversed course entirely on NW, naming it one of his best books of 2012 and writing that underneath the formal experimentation ran a steady, clear, realistic genius, in the best novel she had yet written. Philip Hensher, in the Daily Telegraph, gave it five stars and called it a joyous, angry work likely to be the best English novel published that year or the next.
The BBC adapted it as a television film in 2016, directed by Saul Dibb and starring Nikki Amuka-Bird as Natalie, a modest afterlife for a novel whose reputation still rests mainly on the critics who championed it on publication rather than on any prize that followed.