Table of Contents: On Beauty

Author: Zadie Smith
Publisher/Year: Hamish Hamilton, 2000
Synopsis: Set in contemporary times at an upscale university outside of Boston, her story revolves around two families, the Belseys and the Kippses. Howard Belsey is a white liberal academic and Rembrandt scholar with a black wife. Kiki, and three children. His long-time rival, Sir Montague Kipps, a Caribbean-born conservative, will also now teach at the same university. The oldest of the Belsey children, Jerome, falls in love with Kipps' daughter. Howard's life is further complicated when Kiki learns of an affair he's had with a colleague named Claire, his daughter falls for a young street rapper who takes a poetry course taught by Claire, his youngest son speaks only in gangsta rap, and Kiki strikes up a friendship with Kipps' invalid wife.


What Others Have To Say
The New York Times
"Smith possesses a captivating authorial voice, giving us that rare thing: a novel that is as affecting as it is entertaining, as provocative as it is humane."

San Francisco Chronicle
"It is packed with tangents on the iPod, the seepage of pornography into sex lives, the peculiar fashion imperatives of hip-hop, and glimpses of life in America under Bush.

Seattle Times
"Smith has a grand time hooking up the players in her big cast of characters in every combination possible. Her homage is mainly to Forster, but there are nods to Iris Murdoch, too, whose smarts and flair for farcical drama Smith shares."

The Guardian
"Beautifully observed details of clothing, weather, cityscapes and the bustling human background of drivers, shoppers and passers-by are constantly being folded into the central flow of thought, feeling and action, giving even the most mundane moments - Levi riding a bus into Boston, Howard setting up a projector - a dense, pulsing life."

Book Mark: Costa Book Awards Handed Out

Courtesy of AP:

LONDON – Poet Christopher Reid was awarded Britain's Costa Book of the Year Award on Tuesday with a poetry collection written in tribute to his late wife.

Reid's "A Scattering" — inspired by his wife's death from cancer in 2005 — beat four other finalists to the 30,000 pound ($48,426) prize, which aims to reward the most enjoyable book in the last year by writers based in the U.K. and Ireland.

"I'm delighted and bewildered to be the recipient of this important literary prize," the 60-year-old said as he accepted the award in central London. "The book itself was difficult to write ... It hasn't quietened the grief but it's helped me think more clearly."
Judge Josephine Hart described Reid's winning collection as "austere and beautiful and moving." She compared Reid's work to those by Thomas Hardy and W.B. Yeats, who were both inspired to write by personal tragedy.

"We feel that what Christopher Reid did was to take a personal tragedy and to make the emotion and the situation universal," she said. "It is bizarrely life-enhancing because it speaks of the triumph of love before and after death."

Hart said the judging panel arrived at the decision by a majority. The Book of the Year prize was chosen from five finalists, each already a winner of separate Costa genre awards — novel, first novel, poetry, biography and children's book. Each category winner receives 5,000 pounds ($8,000).

Reid's collection bested the bookies' favorite, "Brooklyn," a novel about a young Irishwoman emigrating to America in the 1950s by Irish author Colm Toibin. Graham Farmelo won the biography prize for "The Strangest Man," a life of physicist Paul Dirac. Raphael Selbourne won the first novel award for "Beauty," the story of a young Bangladeshi woman in Britain on the run from an arranged marriage, and U.S.-born writer Patrick Ness won the children's book award for "The Ask and the Answer."

The prizes — known until 2006 as the Whitbread Book Awards — were established in 1971. They were renamed in 2006 after sponsorship switched from retail and leisure group Whitbread to the Costa coffee shop chain. They are open to residents of Britain and the Republic of Ireland.
Last year's Book of the Year was awarded to Sebastian Barry for his novel "The Secret Scripture."