Helen of Nowhere focuses on an academic, known only as ‘Man’, who has recently lost his job as an English professor and separated from his wife (‘Wife’). He taught on largely transcendentalist themes, which are now being challenged by his (largely female) colleagues and students. His accusation that a student’s work may have been plagiarised was apparently the root of his dismissal, but he believes that he was in the process of being managed out in any case. His wife appears to have tired of him for numerous reasons, and is focused on her own writing career. ‘Man’ is considering a move to the country, and is shown around a large property by ‘Realtor’. The property’s former owner ‘Helen’ is now apparently in care, and has left the task of its sale to the realtor who apparently also lived in the house with her for some time.

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. 

Possession: A Romance (to give it’s full original title) is all sorts of things at once. It’s a detective story, it’s at least two love stories, it’s an incredibly literary and self-referential piece of metafiction, it’s a compendium of (masterful) imitations of various forms of Victorian writing, the list goes on… Ultimately, the heart of the story centres around the discovery of some letters by a modern-day academic, Roland Michell. These letters are the first “clue” in a trail that uncovers a previously undocumented romance between two fictional Victorian poets.