In contrast, the narrator is less confident than Tracey and as a result less ambitious: a slightly unsympathetic heroine, detached in her relationship with her mother and with men. Promiscuous, capable of loyalty and thoughtlessness, hard-edged, hard-nosed and hard-working, she enjoys the uncritical support of her single mother. Tracey is passionate, fickle, self-deluding (she insists her absent father has been not in prison but on tour with Jackson). The narrator abandons her dancing ambitions early in the novel, though she and Tracey continue to spend their afternoons watching Fred Astaire routines and Michael Jackson videos.

From there the novel unspools, moving rapidly back and forth between the girls’ early years and the recent past, to finally reveal the source of the shaming.

We are not told what the narrator, alone and estranged from family and friends and from her former best friend Tracey, has done to deserve her fate. The story opens with a scandal and a public shaming, the modern version of the stocks and whipping post. For many, school friendships are the most enduring relationships of our lives and the nature of those same-sex bonds, the trust and mistrust, the kindness and betrayals, the camaraderie as well as the competitiveness, lie at the centre of Smith’s fifth novel, Swing Time. This is the territory of Zadie Smith at her finest. These subtle distinctions of class and race will drive them apart. But there are differences, too, between Tracey’s slovenly mother, who buys her daughter mountains of toys and a bed in the shape of a pink sports car, and the narrator’s autodidact mother, who urges self-improvement on her daughter and disapproves of her relationship with Tracey and between Tracey’s father, who is serving time in prison, and the narrator’s own father, who is kind and unambitious. These shared backgrounds and desires are what bring the girls together in the school playground and keep them together throughout their growing years. The good dancer Tracey’s father is African-Caribbean, her mother white English the unnamed narrator’s father is white English and her mother African-Caribbean. Both girls are mixed race, but the dynamics of each family are different. The first is their love of dance – one of the girls has talent, the other has flat feet. L ondon in the 1980s: two best friends, with two things in common.

Swing time review