Written during the first months of the COVID-19 pandemic, Intimations is a brief but surprisingly expansive collection of essays that refuses the easy certainties many lockdown books settled into.

Rather than documenting the crisis itself, Zadie Smith treats it as a lens through which to think about time, privilege, suffering, language, art and the strange experience of living through history while still trying to make sense of ordinary life. 

Smith's essays are characteristically lucid, intellectually restless and humane. She moves effortlessly between memoir, literary criticism, philosophy and cultural observation without ever becoming abstract for abstraction's sake. Questions about writing, beauty, inequality, memory and collective responsibility emerge naturally from the texture of everyday experience. 

2020 Penguin Random House paperback, first edition. Very good condition with light shelf wear and a clean, unmarked interior.