I, meanwhile, was caught completely unawares by adolescence, still humming Gershwin songs at the back of the classroom as the friendship rings began to form and harden around me, defined by colour, class, money, postcode, nation, music, drugs, politics, sports, aspirations, languages, sexualities… In that huge game of musical chairs I turned round one day and found that I had no place to sit.” Our narrator is youthfully shortsighted when it comes to this first break between them, as far as she’s concerned Tracey’s life is “perfect” – “one side-effect of envy, maybe, this failure of imagination. The reader, of course, is more worldly-wise.

“With everyone else it’s the dad When your dad’s white it means –” she’s interrupted before she can finish the sentence, so the narrator is left guessing. Tracey has a white mother and a black father for the narrator it’s the other way around, “the wrong way round,” according to Tracey. Initially drawn to each other due to this most “obvious” of similarities, the differences between them are actually pronounced. Rewind to 1982 and two seven-year-olds – both living on the same Willesden council estate, and both with matching brown skin, “as if one piece of tan material had been cut to make us both” – meet at ballet class. The main concern of the book is not what comes after, but rather what led to this act of betrayal.

Its prologue is set in a present in which one friend has attempted to destroy the reputation of the other. Smith took the epigraph to White Teeth, a novel about the process of assimilation faced by London’s immigrant communities, from The Tempest: “What’s past is prologue.” Swing Time, by comparison, begins at the end of the story it tells – that of two mixed-race childhood friends: Tracey, a failed dancer now single mother, and the narrator, a PA to an Australian celebrity superstar. Willesden is where the author grew up and she has already brought it to life vibrantly on the pages of White Teeth, (her debut novel from 2000), and more recently in NW (2012). Swing Time, Zadie Smith’s fifth novel, begins in that particular corner of north-west London now synonymous with the author.

Swing Time by Zadie Smith