She is contemplative and sulky, and her dire circumstances establish a suspense that builds throughout the book we want to know what happened to her. The opening pages introduce us to an unnamed narrator (who remains nameless throughout the novel), a woman who has just lost her job as well as her privacy through some kind of public humiliation. Swing Time, Smith’s latest novel, is a fresh continuation of that tradition, with rich characters, complex relationships, and beautiful truths about the passage of time. In the years since White Teeth, Smith has experimented with her voice, and each of her subsequent books has been a transformation of narrative style while she continues to explore themes of family, race, class, and friendship. Zadie Smith’s prose hummed with energy, syntactic acuity, and graceful, rhythmic precision. 100% of the sale price of every copy of Swing Time will be donated to the USGA Foundation to support the mission and activities of USGA Golf Museum and Library.įor all Swing Time order destinations to the UK and Europe, please order via Grant Books Ltd.I remember thinking that I had never read anything quite like White Teeth. Please note there is no Member discount for this book. Recognizing Swing Time as a major literary contribution and the year’s most outstanding publication on golf history, Jerris and Lewis received the 2022 Murdoch Medal, the British Golf Collectors Society’s most prestigious award. Rand Jerris and Peter Lewis, two of the game’s premier historians, Swing Time illuminates a rich tradition of golf music that runs long and deep, across every continent where the game is played. Most of songs highlighted in the book are published here for the first time for modern audiences. The ephemeral nature of sheet music has rendered examples of golf sheet music exceedingly rare only a single known copy survives for many of the songs featured in this volume. Many of these songs were written by the premier composers and lyricists of the day leading artists created the beautifully illustrated covers. Swing Time: A Celebration of Golf and Music 1870-1939 is a lavishly illustrated survey of golf music that features more than 200 golf songs, many created as stand-alone songs and some written to accompany theatrical productions and early films. Once hugely popular, selling tens of thousands and in a few cases millions of copies, this remarkable corpus of golf music tells extraordinary stories about the connections between golf and popular culture.

Though largely unknown today, a thriving tradition of golf music led to the publication of more than 600 golf songs during these decades.

Winner of the 2022 ISHY Award for Sports Book of the Yearįrom the 1870s until the start of the Second World War, leading American and British composers and lyricists created a profusion of songs and sheet music with golf themes.

Swing time book