Recommendations
Books Like On Beauty
Best books to read after On Beauty by Zadie Smith
Zadie Smith's On Beauty is the Orange Prize-winning novel loosely based on Howards End — two families in a New England university town, thirty years of faculty politics, failed marriages, and children who reject their parents' beliefs. These recommendations continue the Zadie Smith canon, explore the tradition of the British academic novel, or offer companion reading in the tradition of the comic novel about intellectuals who cannot live up to their own ideals.
- 1Buy
White Teeth
by Zadie Smith
The companion debut Zadie Smith — two multicultural North London families across five decades; the most widely read of her novels and the one that most directly shows the sprawling comic energy that On Beauty controls into a smaller, more focused frame.
- 2Buy
NW
by Zadie Smith
The companion experimental Zadie Smith — two women from the same North London council estate who have taken very different paths, told in stream-of-consciousness prose that breaks with the realist form of On Beauty; for readers who want to see where Smith went formally after the Orange Prize.
- 3Buy
Swing Time
by Zadie Smith
The most recent major Zadie Smith — an unnamed narrator's account of her childhood friendship with a girl named Tracey and her adult work for a celebrity; the novel where race, class, and female friendship are explored through music and dance rather than academia.
- 4Buy
Howards End
by E.M. Forster
The original that On Beauty is based on — the Schlegel and Wilcox families and the question of who inherits England; the companion text without which On Beauty is still excellent but with which it becomes a sustained conversation across a century of English-language fiction about class, culture, and the conflict between commercial and intellectual life.
- 5Buy
Lucky Jim
by Kingsley Amis
The classic British academic novel companion — Jim Dixon, a junior history lecturer at a provincial university, trying to keep his job while loathing everyone around him; the prototype British campus novel and the comic predecessor to On Beauty's portrait of faculty politics.
- 6Buy
The Human Stain
by Philip Roth
The American companion academic novel — Coleman Silk, a classics professor whose career is destroyed by a political correctness controversy; the American campus novel most directly comparable to On Beauty in its interest in how universities fail to live up to their own ideals about race, identity, and truth.
- 7Buy
My Brilliant Friend
by Elena Ferrante
The companion in the tradition of the literary novel about class, education, and female ambition — Elena and Lila in Naples; shares On Beauty's interest in what education does to women from different backgrounds and the way class shapes relationships even among people who claim to transcend it.
- 8Buy
Prep
by Curtis Sittenfeld
The American companion in the tradition of the literary novel about education and class — Lee Fiora at a prestigious boarding school in Massachusetts; shares On Beauty's setting in New England and its interest in how elite education reproduces class inequality while claiming to challenge it.
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