Though both girls aspired to leave the Estate, their lives took different directions. The heart of the book is the friendship between Natalie and Leah, who met when Natalie saved Leah from drowning, pulling her out of the kiddie pool by her red braids. That is, until the afternoon a stranger comes to Leah’s door begging for help, launching a chain of events that pulls the four of them together again. Now adults, they live only streets apart, though due to varying degrees of ambition, desire and luck, they might as well inhabit different worlds. The neighborhood is a patchwork of British urban diversity-African, Jamaican and Irish Pentecostal and Rastafarian-and home to four childhood friends, Leah, Natalie, Nathan and Felix. NW is set in Smith’s home turf of northwest London, in and around the Caldwell Housing Estates. This highly anticipated novel has many qualities associated with this talented young British novelist, including a strong sense of place, an eye for diversity and an ear for dialogue, but this ambitious work unfolds in an unconventional manner that’s more Virginia Woolf than E.M. It’s been seven years since Zadie Smith’s last novel, On Beauty, and it’s fair to say that her fans are excited about NW.
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