Instructions for a Heatwave is set during the UK’s record-breaking 1976 heatwave and drought. It focuses on an Irish family, led by Gretta and Robert Riordan, who moved to London and raised three children, who have all now left home.. Robert goes out one morning for a newspaper and mysteriously disappears, which is the impetus for a re-grouping of the remaining family members, all of whom are dealing with their own issues and harbouring secrets.

On Beauty, unlike many of Smith’s other novels, is set predominantly in the US - though still has a healthy focus on Britain (or at least Britain as represented by - once again - North-West London).  It focuses on the intertwined lives of two families - the Belseys and the Kipps. Both have university professors at the helm, in the shape of Howard Belsey, a white English Rembrandt scholar (living with his African-American wife Kiki and three children in a fictional affluent university town near Boston, MA), and his nemesis Monty Kipps, a conservative Trinidadian initially living in London with his wife Carlene and two children.