Swing Time. By Zadie Smith. Penguin Press; 453 pages; $27. Hamish Hamilton; £18.99.

AT A fateful ballet class on a Saturday in 1982, two little girls mark each other out for friendship, recognising their shared shade of brown, “as if one piece of tan material had been cut to make [them] both”. One is born to dance; the other has flat feet. One is her mother’s “aspiration and avatar”, dressed in “yellow bows, a frou-frou skirt of many ruffles and a crop top”; the other’s mother is a feminist who believes plainness “signifies admirable maternal restraint”, and that it is bad taste to dress your daughter “like a little whore”. “Swing Time” is about those two little girls, and who they become.

Zadie Smith was recognised as a powerful and searing writer with her debut “White Teeth” at the age of 24. Sixteen years later, her most recent work is in many ways her strongest. It is the first of her books written in the first person, narrated by the unnamed, flat-footed of the two girls. The immediacy lends an edge of complicity; Ms Smith has said she thinks of it as telling “a true lie”. She revisits familiar themes from her previous books—multicultural society, family, race, identity—but her convictions are stronger and her scope wider, this time reaching well beyond her usual territory of Britain and America. But the seeds of the story are sown on a council estate in London.

Having recognised at seven the “invisible band” connecting them, the narrator and Tracey become inseparable. But hints of darkness in Tracey’s life bubble up at playtime. Their make-believe stories end with ballerinas getting shot. Her salvation is her talent for dance, and when she gets into stage school, our narrator believes her life is set on a dream course. The girls fall out of touch, grow up, and the narrator, used to being a “shadow”, eventually drifts into a job as an assistant to a pop star called Aimee. Despite a globetrotting life, her initial admiration and wonder at this ethereal character turn to disillusionment and eventually resentment, sparking a destructive series of events. The tipping point is Aimee’s misguided venture to save Africa by building a school.

“Swing Time” weaves together haves and have-nots in the past and present, from Kingston and Bendigo to New York and Paris. Her story has “rich birds with no kids, poor birds with plenty”, a racist Iranian restaurant-owner and his long-suffering Somali delivery-boy, sex tourists in west Africa and a mixed-race Anglo-American gay couple in Harlem. Dispossessed and disenfranchised characters, both in the West and in Africa, can only make sense of the world by believing that it is run by a powerful and distant elite—perhaps even lizard people or the Illuminati.

Ms Smith’s strength is her capacity for linking the local, the global and the personal. She understands that people are products of history reaching back for hundreds of years. But she also recognises the impact of those immediately around her characters, imperfect people doing their best “within the limits of being themselves”. The narrator’s parents are a strident self-taught academic mother and an unambitious postal-worker father who could only offer “love and latitude” and the example of an “early stoned retirement”. Despite their flaws, they offer the kind of invisible support unavailable to Tracey, whose dreams unravel with a sad inevitability. All her ambition and promise are irrelevant when weighed against her experiences as a child. The narrator saddens at the thought of Tracey and all her talent joining the already overflowing “ranks of the unwitnessed ”.

Ms Smith has written a powerful story of lives marred by secrets, unfulfilled potential and the unjustness of the world. But she has interwoven it with another beautiful story of the dances people do to rise above it all.