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Ratings: ★★★★★ (4.8/5)
Genre: Literary Fiction, Contemporary Fiction, Family Saga

Book Review:
Zadie Smith's ''On Beauty'' is a novel of dazzling intelligence, wit, and heart. It is a book that takes the classic family saga and infuses it with a modern energy, exploring the complexities of love, race, and identity with a sharp, unflinching eye and a deep, abiding compassion. The novel centers on the Belsey family, a mixed-race Anglo-American clan living in the fictional New England college town of Wellington. Howard Belsey is an art historian who has spent his career failing to complete his book on Rembrandt. His wife, Kiki, is a formidable African-American woman who is growing tired of her husband's intellectual pretensions and emotional failings. Their children—Jerome, Zora, and Levi—are each navigating their own paths, trying to define themselves in the shadow of their parents' complicated legacy. Into their lives comes the Kipps family, led by Monty Kipps, a Trinidadian right-wing intellectual who is Howard's nemesis. The two families become entangled in ways that are both comic and tragic, leading to confrontations over art, politics, and, ultimately, love. Smith's prose is as energetic and inventive as ever. She has a genius for capturing the way people speak and think, and she populates her novel with a cast of characters who are vividly alive and deeply human. ''On Beauty'' is a novel about the things we fight about and the things we fight for, about the lies we tell ourselves and the truths we can't escape. It is funny, sad, wise, and utterly absorbing. A triumph.