But stasis is precisely what Leah craves. She doesn't share his aspirations, least of all the baby that he longs for and that everyone else has come to expect. She has just discovered that she's pregnant when a girl appears on her doorstep asking for money, a chance encounter leading to other chance encounters that weave the disparate strands of the novel into its whole.

Leah's best friend from Caldwell is Keisha Blake, whose God-fearing Caribbean family have high aspirations for her — "a one-year Business Administration course at "Coles Academy", really just a corridor of   office space above the old Woolworths on the Kilburn High Road. A racket, an uncredited institution, taught by some Nairobi acquaintance of Pastor Akinwande, and requiring no move away from home". Where Leah wants nothing whatsoever to change, Keisha alters everything, fighting her way into Bristol University where she renames herself Natalie, slips free of her earnest, tedious Caldwell boyfriend and eventually becomes a barrister, along the way acquiring a banker husband, two perfect children and a nostalgie de la boue so overwhelming that it threatens to destroy everything else.   

No one has it easy here but despite their trials, the women fare substantially better than the men. Leah and Natalie's former classmate, Nathan, has fallen almost as far as there is to go; Felix Cooper, sunny and self-deluding and buoyed by the love of a strong woman, will not have the good fortune his first name promises. If the refracted narrative takes a bit of work at the beginning, Smith's comedy and dialogue are both pitch-perfect, the latter encompassing a virtuosic range from coked-up fallen aristocrat to Nathan's pure north London slang:

Walking down Kilburn High Road Natalie Blake had a strong desire to slip into the lives of other people. It was hard to see how this desire could be practicably satisfied or what, if anything, it really meant. "Slip into" is an imprecise thought. Follow the Somali kid home? Sit with the old Russian lady at the bus stop outside Poundland? Join the Ukrainian gangster at his table in the cake shop? A local tip: the bus stop outside Kilburn's Poundland is the site of many of the more engaging conversations to be heard in the city of London. You're welcome.  

Here, Willesden is a vivid, brutal world in miniature, drawing the population of our peripheral vision into focus; opening up unimaginable other lives.