'I get in trouble when I talk about the state of the nation'

After 17 years abroad, Zadie Smith has returned to her literary stomping ground of north London. She talks about fame, therapy and finding inspiration for her latest novel on her doorstep

- Lisa Allardice

ZADIE SMITH HAS RETURNED TO Kilburn, where she grew up and which she has made her fictional territory since White Teeth turned her into a star in 2000. Her fourth novel was called, simply, NW. Even those novels that don't take the streets of north-west London as their backdrop - On Beauty, Swing Time - touch down for a visit. Many of her characters escape only to come back eventually, as she has done, leaving New York during the pandemic with her husband, the Northern Irish poet Nick Laird, and their two children. "If you stay away too long, you just miss too much," she says.

We meet in the William IV pub on the Harrow Road. Smith arrives on her bike in a black T-shirt and jeans, weighed down by a London Review of Books tote straining with books and her laptop. She has just made the school run. (Her brother Ben - comedian and rapper Doc Brown - and his family live close by, and his wife teaches at the school where Zadie and her brothers went as children. "So it's all very familiar," she says.) The pub has been chosen for its relevance to Smith's latest novel, The Fraud, which is once again set around Kilburn. But instead of the exhaust fumes, kebab joints and market stalls of her earlier novels, The Fraud looks back to a time when this area was fields and manor houses. With its social injustice, inheritances, trials and reversals of fortune, the novel combines the world of Dickens (who makes a cameo appearance) with the verve of Hilary Mantel's historical fiction. It is also extraordinarily timely. As Smith herself says: "It's a corker."