What appealed to me most about Swing Time were the significant similarities between the main character’s life and Smith’s own. You will always have me at ‘based on a true story’. Zadie Smith was born in 1975 in Brent, north-west London to a Jamaican mother and an English father. The novel certainly feels like watching a slow-motion dance routine; giving its reader time to frown and ponder the intricacies of the footwork and the interactions of its four starring women.