White Teeth: x - Softcover

Smith, Zadie

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0140276335 ISBN 13: 9780140276336

Publisher: Penguin, 2001

Synopsis

From the MAN BOOKER PRIZE- and WOMEN'S PRIZE-SHORTLISTED author of Swing Time, On Beauty and Grand Union

'BELIEVE THE HYPE' The Times

'The almost preposterous talent was clear from the first pages' Julian Barnes, Guardian

'Street-smart and learned, sassy and philosophical all at the same time' New York Times

'Outstanding' Sunday Telegraph

The international bestseller and modern classic of multicultural Britain - an unforgettable portrait of London

One of the most talked about debut novels of all time, White Teeth is a funny, generous, big-hearted novel, adored by critics and readers alike. Dealing - among many other things - with friendship, love, war, three cultures and three families over three generations, one brown mouse, and the tricky way the past has of coming back and biting you on the ankle, it is a life-affirming, riotous must-read of a book.

About this title

Review

Epic in scale and intimate in approach, White Teeth is an ambitious novel. Genetics, eugenics, gender, race, class and history are the book's themes but Zadie Smith is gifted with the wit and inventiveness to make these weighty ideas seem effortlessly light.

The story travels through Jamaica, Turkey, Bangladesh and India but ends up in a scrubby North London borough, home of the book's two unlikely heroes: prevaricating Archie Jones and intemperate Samad Iqbal. They met in the Second World War, as part of a "Buggered Battalion" and have been best friends ever since. Archie marries beautiful, buck-toothed Clara, who's on the run from her Jehovah's Witness mother, and they have a daughter, Irie. Samad marries stroppy Alsana and they have twin sons: "Children with first and last names on a direct collision course. Names that secrete within them mass exodus, cramped boats and planes, cold arrivals, medical checks."

Big questions demand boldly drawn characters. Zadie Smith's aren't heroic, just real: warm, funny, misguided and entirely familiar; reading their conversations is like eavesdropping. A simple scene, Alsana and Clara chatting about their pregnancies in the park: "A woman has to have the private things--a husband needn't be involved in body business, in a lady's ... parts."

Samad's rant about his sons--"They have both lost their way. Strayed so far from what I had intended for them. No doubt they will both marry white women called Sheila and put me in an early grave--acutely displays "the immigrant fears--dissolution, disappearance" but it also gets to the very heart of Samad.

White Teeth is a joy to read. It teems with life and exuberence and has enough cleverness and irreverent seriousness to give it bite. --Eithne Farry

Review

She is . . . a George Eliot of multi-culturalism (Daily Telegraph)

The first publishing sensation of the millennium (Observer)

White Teeth reflects a new generation (Guardian)

[Zadie Smith] is one of the prominent voices of her generation

(Sunday Times)

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0140276335
• ISBN 13: 9780140276336
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 560