After 17 years abroad, Zadie Smith is back. She has returned to Kilburn in north-west London, where she grew up and which she has made her fictional territory since White Teeth turned her into a star in 2000. Her fourth novel was called, simply, NW. Even those novels that aren’t set here – On Beauty, Swing Time – touch down for a visit. Many of her characters escape only to come back eventually, just as she did, leaving New York during the pandemic with her husband, the Northern Irish poet Nick Laird, and their two children. “If you stay away too long, you just miss too much,” she says.
We meet in the William IV pub on the Harrow Road. Smith arrives on her bike in a black T-shirt and jeans, weighed down by a London Review of Books tote straining with books and her laptop. She is post-school run. (Her brother Ben – the comedian and rapper Doc Brown – and his family live close by, and his wife teaches at the school Zadie and her brothers went to as a children. “So it’s all very familiar,” she says now.) The pub has been chosen for its relevance to Smith’s new novel, The Fraud, which is once again set around Kilburn. But instead of the exhaust fumes, kebab joints and market stalls of her earlier novels, The Fraud looks back to a time when this area was just fields and manor houses. With its social injustice, inheritances, trials and reversals of fortune, the novel combines the world of Dickens (who has his own cameo appearances) with the verve of Hilary Mantel’s historical fiction. It is also extraordinarily timely. As Smith herself says: “It’s a corker.”
