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The Autograph Man
The Autograph Man
Jun 20, 2025 3:28 PM

Author:Zadie Smith,Henry Goodman

The Autograph Man

Zadie Smith's deeply funny, subversive and splendidly entertaining The Autograph Man is a whirlwind tour of celebrity and our fame-obsessed times.

Following one Alex-Li Tandem - a twenty-something, Chinese-Jewish autograph dealer turned on by sex, drugs and organised religion - it takes in London and New York, love and death, fathers and sons, as Alex tries to discover how a piece of paper can bring him closer to his heart's desire. Exposing our misconceptions about our idols - about ourselves - Zadie Smith delivers in The Autograph Man a brilliant, unforgettable tale about who we are and what we really want to be.

'A glorious concoction written by our most beguiling and original prose-wizard' Independent on Sunday

'A brilliant comedy with a tantalising throb of mystic philosophy underneath' Philip Hensher, Books of the Year, Spectator

'A pleasure from the first page to the last' Evening Standard

'Intellectually agile ... ecstatic inventiveness' Time

'A classic' Spectator

'Genuinely funny and entertaining' Guardian

'Vibrant, highly imaginative' Jewish Chronicle

'Full of irony, humour, the search for love and the fear of death ... a touching, thoughtful, deeply felt rite-of-passage novel' Sunday Telegraph

Zadie Smith was born in north-west London in 1975. Her debut novel, White Teeth, won the Whitbread First Novel Award, the Guardian First Book Award, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction, and the Commonwealth Writers' First Book Prize, and was included in TIME 100 Best English-language Novels from 1923 to 2005. Her second novel, On Beauty, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and won the Orange Prize for Fiction. She has written two further novels, The Autograph Man and NW, a collection of essays Changing My Mind, and also edited short story anthology The Book of Other People. Zadie Smith was chosen by Granta as one of its twenty best young British novelists in 2003, and as well as to Granta has contributed writing to the New Yorker and the Guardian.

Zadie Smith's new novel, NW, is available from September 2012.

Reviews

[There are] those of us who have buttonholed strangers on the Underground and raved about Moorcock's masterpieces Byzantium Endures and The Laughter of Carthage

—— Sunday Telegraph

His is the grand, messy flux itself, in all its heroic vulgarity, its unquenchable optimism, its enthusiasm for the inexhaustible variousness of things. Posterity will certainly give him that due place in English literature

—— Angela Carter , Guardian

An exciting, ecstatic work of criticism

—— Guardian

A good deal of intellectual athleticism on display... Eco is a scintillating lecturer, and an elegant journalist... At his most mercurial

—— Independent

On Literature is a provocative and entertaining collection of sprightly essays on the key texts that have shaped Eco the novelist and critic

—— The Book People

'You'll be flipping pages so fast, the breeze will keep you cool on the beach'

—— New Woman

'Fast paced and funny...the perfect summer read'

—— 19

This is one that you won't want to miss - a wonderful debut novel

—— Armchair Interviews.com

Intelligent chick-lit ... This laugh-out-loud debut will captivate readers

—— Publishers Weekly

This debut novel is a fresh, thoroughly enjoyable read

—— Sarah Broadhurst

Wonderfully comic and touching

—— Sunday Telegraph

Interweaves a variety of thoroughly imagined life stories and predicaments with quiet, effective skill

—— Mail on Sunday

I have greater admiration for Margaret Forster than for most novelists. A very fine, continuously interesting, and often moving work, all the better because it is so firmly rooted in the ordinary world of everyday experience

—— Scotsman

Cadwalladr also captures the desperation at the heart of most good comedy. She maintains the tragicomic balance to the end and has the confidence to chose the right, realistic ending over the wrong, romantic one

—— The Observer/Review

A hilariously funny and moving chronical of three generations of the Monroe family told through the eyes of Rebecca in the 1970s. It is not just a habit of quoting proverbs and a recipe for sherry trifle that have passed down the maternal line. There's a habit of broken marriages, dubiously fathered children and untimely deaths.

—— Elite

Rebecca Monroe is really stumped when it comes to her family's behaviour. Why, on the day Charles and Camilla got married, did her mum lock herself in the loo and refuse to come out? Was it due to the collapse of her chocolate cake, or because Rebecca's grandmother ended up marrying her first cousin?

Pondering what it is that makes her clan click, Rebecca is determined to discover whether it is genes or fate that affects the different generations.

A fun little romp about the joys of family and the genes we inherit.

—— OK Met Stars

Touching and surprising...A moving account of the personal and social pressures that shape our childhood experiences and resonate throughout out lives

—— The Sunday Times

This exciting first novel by a talented writer is a moving exploration of family life in the twenty-first century...You won't want to put this book down

—— My Weekly

Hilariously funny and moving chronicle of three generations

—— Peterborough Evening News
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