Given her allergy to present technologies and the grand realism of her novels, Smith can come across as a writer from another era caught in the present, and that’s not always far off. As a young mixed-race girl growing up not exactly poor in a London council estate—her mother Jamaican, her father “a short white guy”721—there were novels around the house, but the Smith household wasn’t particularly bookish, and Smith looked up to the rarefied literary world from the outside.
