Where to start with Zadie Smith

British novelist, born 1975. Won the Women's Prize for Fiction in 2006.

Best Zadie Smith book to start with: White Teeth (2000), on 10 of the 21 lists it could have made.

Read White Teeth first. It’s funny, and it follows two families in north-west London over a few decades, with a huge cast and a lot of ideas. She is at her best on dialogue and on big groups of people who disagree with each other. It’s long, but it reads quickly once you’re in it.

After that, read On Beauty, a campus novel set in the United States that takes Forster’s Howards End as its starting point. It won a major prize and it’s the best of her others to try second. The Fraud is her most recent on the index, a historical novel built around a real Victorian court case, and readers like it.

NW is harder: it is fragmentary, it changes form as it goes, and critics rate it highly. Come to it after you’re used to her. The Autograph Man, her second novel, is the one to save for last.