White Teeth: Smith Zadie - Softcover

Smith, Zadie

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0140297782 ISBN 13: 9780140297782

Publisher: Penguin, 2000

Synopsis

Published in the first month of the first year of the new century, Zadie Smith's debut novel White Teeth - winner of the Guardian First Book Award and the Whitbread First Novel Award - was an immediate bestseller and stunningly acclaimed.

One of the most talked about fictional débuts of ever, 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.

'Funny, clever ... and a rollicking good read' Independent

'An astonishingly assured début, funny and serious ... I was delighted' Salman Rushdie

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

'Quirky, sassy and wise ... a big, splashy, populous production reminiscent of books by Dickens and Salman Rushdie ... demonstrates both an instinctive storytelling talent and a fully fashioned voice that's street-smart and learned, sassy and philosophical all at the same time' New York Times

'Smith writes like an old hand, and, sometimes, like a dream' New Yorker

'Outstanding ... A strikingly clever and funny book with a passion for ideas, for language and for the rich tragic-comedy of life' Sunday Telegraph

'Do believe the hype' The Times

'Relentlessly funny ... idiosyncratic, and deeply felt' Guardian

Zadie Smith was born in north-west London in 1975. Her debut novel, White Teeth, won the Whitbread First Novel Award, the Guardian First Book Award, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction, and the Commonwealth Writers' First Book Prize, and was included in TIME 100 Best English-language Novels from 1923 to 2005. Her second novel, On Beauty, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and won the Orange Prize for Fiction. She has written two further novels, The Autograph Man and NW, a collection of essays Changing My Mind, and also edited short story anthology The Book of Other People. Zadie Smith was chosen by Granta as one of its twenty best young British novelists in 2003, and as well as to Granta has contributed writing to the New Yorker and the Guardian.

Zadie Smith's new novel, NW, is available from September 2012.

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

Funny, clever ... and a rollicking good read (Independent)

Do believe the hype, buy into it, curl up with it, savour every sentence, then turn around and re-read (The Times)

An impressive début, not only for its vitality and verve, but mainly for the sheer audacity of its scope and vision ... an epic tale ... swooping, funny ... it has ambition, wit and is unafraid (Meera Syal Express)

Announces the debut of a preternaturally gifted new writer ... street-smart and learned, sassy and philosophical all at the same time (The New York Times)

An astonishingly assured début, funny and serious ... I was delighted (Salman Rushdie)

Relentlessly funny ... idiosyncratic, and deeply felt (Guardian)

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0140297782
• ISBN 13: 9780140297782
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 560