“There’s always somebody who wants to be the big man.” Zadie Smith’s new short story The Embassy of Cambodia, which first appeared in The New Yorker in February, is all about power.

It tells the story of Fatou, a migrant servant to the Derawal family in Willesden, who withhold her wages and passport. She finds some freedom on Monday mornings, when she sneaks away from work and steals her employer’s guest pass to go swimming at the local health centre.

Previously walled in to the resort in which she worked in West Africa, Fatou is now excluded by the walls of private houses and those of the mysterious new Cambodian Embassy. During her coffees in a Tunisian cafe with Andrew, a Nigerian business student, she talks with him about being on the wrong side of the wall: “Are we born to suffer?” she asks.

All Fatou can see above the wall of the embassy on her walks to the swimming pool is the arc of a shuttlecock in a mysterious game of badminton. The chapters record the score, 0-1 to 0-21, but we never find out who wins.

At only 69 pages long, The Embassy of Cambodia is simple, unpretentious and quite different from Smith’s more experimental NW, also set in Willesden. Not a long story, but nothing short of brilliant.

What is even better, though, is the audiobook version, read by Zadie herself. As someone who associates audiobooks with the droning of the cassette player in granddad’s car, I was surprised at how much I enjoyed this one.

Perhaps reading aloud works best with poetry; audio versions of novels can be painfully slow. Yet being just 55 minutes long, The Embassy of Cambodia can be listened to in one sitting. Once you start listening, it is almost impossible not to continue to the end.

Zadie, who sang as a jazz singer while she studied at Cambridge, has a wonderfully deep voice. Her reading of Andrew’s dialogue, Nigerian accent and all, is very convincing. Audiobook readings can be mechanical, but because Zadie is reading her own work she can articulate all its comic and allusive nuances.

Penguin might have been thinking of Christmas stocking fillers when they published this tiny book and I won’t be surprised if I see people taking it out of handbags and pockets on the tube in January. Next time I’m on the tube to Willesden though, I’ll be taking out my earphones, and so should you.