On Beauty

On Beauty is a novel by the English writer Zadie Smith, published in 2005 and shortlisted for the Booker Prize that year.

Howard Belsey is an English academic teaching in Wellington, a college town in New England, where he lives with his African American wife Kiki and their three teenage children. Thirty years into the marriage he is trying to recover something of what it was, and he is not doing it well. The novel follows the family through a season of quarrels and attachments, with Jerome, Zora and Levi each looking for something to commit to, and their parents' lives becoming tangled with those of a rival scholar and his family whose politics are the opposite of Howard's. Smith wrote the book as a loose retelling of Howards End, and it takes its title from an essay on beauty and justice, which is one of the arguments the characters keep having.

The novel won the Orange Prize for Fiction and the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in 2006, and it is set between an American college town and London.