Critics have noted the ways in which this is a postmodern novel that "raises questions about the nature of representation". And as much as I appreciated the meta-commentary on clichés, it’s a bold move to deliberately build a novel out of them.

Begin with one of her short story collections, such as The Whole Story And Other Stories, and follow it up with her latest and arguably her best novel, The Accidental, the tale of the mundane summer holiday of 12-year-old Astrid and her family - mother Eve, stepfather Michael and elder brother Magnus – which is interrupted by the arrival of an enigmatic guest. Later on, she imagines in loving detail the fiery apocalypse that would follow an asteroid crashing into the earth. Autumn” and “Winter,” which must have been written at great speed, have the aspect of political pop-up books, quick, witty reads eager to have their say on the very latest news: Brexit, the refugee crisis, Donald Trump, climate change, the terrible fire that, last summer, demolished Grenfell Tower, in West London, killing seventy-one people. The feckless littérateur Michael, love-stricken, feels his life become a poem sequence, which Smith rather courageously gives us in full.Johnson appears to demote the pun to a mere “quibble,” and announced that a quibble was “the fatal Cleopatra” for whom Shakespeare, like Antony, “lost the world, and was content to lose it. She uses "ie" a lot at first, and then switches to "id est" once someone tells her that it comes from Latin. to be more,” Helena Fisker says in Smith’s best-known novel, “How to Be Both” (2014), in which a woman becomes a man, and two contemporary English girls, living in Cambridge, imagine themselves into the life of a medieval Italian artist.

Michael is inspired by her ignoring him and smitten into lust and love by her apparent innocence and goodness. They will be forever changed by Amber but how will they know whether it is for the bad, the good or something else entirely? Smith has written a proper novel with a beginning, a middle and an end, but turned it into an exuberantly inventive series of variations. She has been four times shortlisted for the Booker Prize, has won the Goldsmiths Prize, Orwell Prize, Costa Best Novel Award and the Women’s Prize.It is indeed a brave new world, not in Shakespeare’s sense but in Huxley’s dystopian one (that is to say, nasty, British, and short).

We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.It becomes all to easy to detest the Smart mère et père, for they are eye-rollingly entitled and pretentious, but this novel is about the kids.