'Towards the end of Son of Sin, the narrator – a now adult Jamal Khaddaj Smith – relates a memory of ‘telling some story of his life’ to friends ‘like Adam or [his housemate] Dan’. His friends respond to his story ‘with mingled disbelief and wonderment, saying, Your life is like a soap opera – because there were too many characters, too much death, nothing at all like the kind of spare, elegant novels they studied in school’. ' (Introduction)