Zadie Smith’s new work, Swing Time, is a story of ‘two brown girls who dream of being dancers’, while Ali Smith’s Autumn will form part of a Seasonal quartet

Zadie Smith’s first novel since 2012’s NW, a story about “two brown girls [who] dream of being dancers”, will come out this winter, her publishers have announced.

Smith’s Swing Time is “a story about friendship and music and stubborn roots, about how we are shaped by these things and how we can survive them”, said Hamish Hamilton. Set in north-west London and west Africa, it will follow the lives of two girls who both want to become dancers, but only one of whom has talent.

“The other has ideas: about rhythm and time, about black bodies and black music, what constitutes a tribe, or makes a person truly free. It’s a close but complicated childhood friendship that ends abruptly in their early 20s, never to be revisited, but never quite forgotten, either,” said Hamish Hamilton, which described the novel as “dazzlingly energetic and deeply human”.

Smith, whose debut novel White Teeth won the Guardian first book award, and whose On Beauty won the Orange prize, gave more details about the book in a reading at Johns Hopkins University in November 2015. Revealing two chapters from the unpublished novel, she said it was about “tap dancing, blackness and time”, and that while both of the girls grow up in a poor London neighbourhood, one of them, Tracy, goes on to dance professionally, while the “unnamed first-person narrator becomes a personal assistant to a pop star”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Ali Smith’s new work is a meditation on harvest, say publishers. Photograph: Christian Sinibaldi/The Guardian

Hamish Hamilton has also announced a new novel from the Bailey’s prize winner Ali Smith. Autumn, out in August this year, will be the first of four novels named after a season and will, said the publisher, be “a stripped-branches take on popular culture, and a meditation, in a world growing ever more bordered and exclusive, on what richness and worth are”.

The four novels, which will go on to form Smith’s Seasonal quartet, will be standalone, said Hamish Hamilton, “separate yet interconnected and cyclical, exploring what time is, how we experience it, and the recurring markers in the shapes our lives take and in our ways with narrative”.