Now, I'm one of those people who's a little jealous of Ms Smith's success, believing that she's caught a lot of attention due to her ethnicity, fabulous name and great looks plus she's clearly one smart cookie. From what I've heard her first book was marred by a bad ending and her second was just plain bad. I'll reserve judgement, but this reworking of Howard's End is expansively warm and attuned to nuances of behaviour and psychology. It's her great acheivement to make us sympathise with all of her characters ( well the Belsey's anyway) and inject the book with such gusto, joie de vivre and humour while remaining serious to her purpose.

There's a Dickensian relish in characterisation and in some of the writing. For example:

"Summer left Wellington abruptly and slammed the door on the way out. The shudder sent the leaves to the ground all at once..."

That's something I'd expect in Dickens - it's got that narrator's tone of authority and a reduction of something universal and mystical to the plain domestic that Dickens would often use. There are though some moments when the book is clearly a little over-written: Ladies and gentlemen of the jury.....

"And so it happened again, the daily miracle whereby interiority opens out and brings to bloom the million-petalled flower of being here in the world, with other people. Neither as hard as she [Zora] had thought it might be nor as easy as it appeared."

That's maybe a little too precious to fit in with the rest of the book, a mite too keen to please, and it jumped out at me when I read it. There's evidently quite a bit of Zadie in the character of Zora.