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On Beauty

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On Beauty

By: Zadie Smith
Narrated by: Peter Francis James
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About this listen

Brought to you by Penguin.

Winner of The Women's Prize

Shortlisted for The Man Booker Prize 2015

Sunday Times Top 10 Best Seller

From the acclaimed author of Swing Time, White Teeth and Grand Union, discover a brilliantly funny and deeply moving story about love and family

Why do we fall in love with the people we do? Why do we visit our mistakes on our children? What makes life truly beautiful?

Set between New England and London, On Beauty concerns a pair of feuding families—the Belseys and the Kipps—and a clutch of doomed affairs. It puts low morals among high ideals and asks some searching questions about what life does to love. For the Belseys and the Kipps, the confusions—both personal and political—of our uncertain age are about to be brought close to home: right to the heart of family.

©2005 Zadie Smith (P)2021 Penguin Audio Family Life Fiction Genre Fiction Literary Fiction Funny

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Critic reviews

The tale of a mixed-race British American family in conflict with another family of opposing sensibilities. As with all Smith's work, it's smart, funny and a masterclass in the complexities of identity (Luan Goldie)
All stars
Most relevant  
The narrator is perfect and great at an English accent. The novel is cool AF.

Fantastic presentation, because it’s bbc books America

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Overall good performance but right to the end I was expecting a plot to develop or even something to happen. For me it was an overly long listen with not much beauty.

Enjoyed the performance

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I loved this from beginning to end - a great comedy about campus life and the snobbery of ego driven academics. Brilliant!

Wonderful narration and story

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Someone at Penguin needs to proof check this as there are many technical glitches (skips/repeats)

Great book and recording but there are many glitches

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Ending was weak and left ends which were not satisfying story just stopped which is a real shame

Well written

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This book has sat on my bookshelf since the year it was published. Bought because I do judge books by their cover. I struggled to get into the paper version so I gave the audible a go and Peter Francis James brought the book to life with a myriad of accents. This is a long and enjoyable listen. There are technical issues with the recording, it jumps like a scratched record at several point. This is surprising as it’s produced by the BBC America, but the story and performance outweigh the technical shortcomings. Yes I would recommend.

Beautiful

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Loved the story, characters all excellently written, the dialogue in particular I loved. it's very well performed as well couldn't have been done better.

the dialogue and the performance

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Zadie Smith is just astounding.

But unfortunately this recording is like how tapes used to go when you unwound them; at points it’s fine, but then it jumps around and sounds weird.

Great book but the recording is broken

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Subtly hilarious, deeply nostalgic and incredibly nuanced character development. This was my fave Zadie Smith novel ever.

Loved it

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But the sound jumps and scratches in places. needs to be rerecorded because those bits are jarring

Incredibly written & performed

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