White Teeth [Paperback]

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 --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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 )

One of the most talked about fictional débuts of recent years, 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.

What the reviewers have said:
"Zadie Smith's fizzing first novel is about how we all got here - from the Caribbean, from the Indian sub-continent, from the thirteenth place in a long-ago Olympic bicycle race - and about what here turned out to be. It's an astonishingly assured debut, funny and serious, and the voice has real writerly idiosyncrasy. I was delighted by WHITE TEETH, and often impressed. It has ... bite." Salman Rushdie

"A brilliantly written and hugely inspiring book - buying it should go straight to the top of your New Year's resolution list." Red Magazine, (Top three reads)

"Smith perfectly captures the angst of life in an alien culture and, despite the seriousness of her theme, she can be wickedly funny. You'll laugh out loud...the entire book is speckled with lighter manifestations of cross-culture quirks...Above all, Smith has created a cast of characters that leaps off the page and keeps you engrossed to the surprising denouement." Livewire

"WHITE TEETH is no acne-ridden teenage tragedy. Zadie Smith presses all the right buttons in modern, multicultural Britain, easily and unpreachily." Evening Standard

"Smith can write. Her novel has energy, pace, humour and fully formed characters; it is blissfully free of the introversion and self-consciousness detail that mar many first novels. Smith has stories to tell and, in the tradition of Peter Carey and Salman Rushdie, she gets on with them; the dialogue is pitch perfect, the comedy neat and underplayed." Daily Telegraph

"This is an ambitious first novel, and she pulls it off magnificently, bringing all the characters and ideas together in a farcical denouement; the weighty themes are easily and humorously handled...an outsatnding novel, refreshingly upbeat and deserving of all the attention it is getting." Evening Standard

"This is a strikingly clever and funny book with a passion for ideas, for language and for the rich tragi-comedy of life...It is her ebullient, simple prose and her generous understanding of human nature that make Zadie Smith's novel outstanding. It is not only great fun to read, but full of hope. Written by a member of a generation described by the author herself as "children with first and last names on a great collision course", the reader is encouraged to look forward, like Irie Jones, to 'a time, not far from now, when roots won't matter any more.'" Sunday Telegraph --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Zadie Smith was born in North West London in 1975 and continues to live in the area. She is currently working on a second novel.

Early in the morning, late in the century, Cricklewood Broadway. At 06.27 hours on 1 January 1975, Alfred Archibald Jones was dressed in corduroy and sat in a fume-filled Cavalier Musketeer Estate face down on the steering wheel, hoping the judgement would not be too heavy upon him. He lay forward in a prostrate cross, jaw slack, arms splayed either side like some fallen angel; scrunched up in each fist he held his army service medals (left) and his marriage licence (right), for he had decided to take his mistakes with him. A little green light flashed in his eye, signalling a right turn he had resolved never to make. He was resigned to it. He was prepared for it. He had flipped a coin and stood staunchly by its conclusions. This was a decided-upon suicide. In fact it was a New Year's resolution.
But even as his breathing became spasmodic and his lights dimmed, Archie was aware that Cricklewood Broadway would seem a strange choice. Strange to the first person to notice his slumped figure through the windscreen, strange to the policemen who would file the report, to the local journalist called upon to write fifty words, to the next of kin who would read them. Squeezed between an almighty concrete cinema complex at one end and a giant intersection at the other, Cricklewood was no kind of place. It was not a place a man came to die. It was a place a man came in order to go other places via the A14. But Archie Jones didn't want to die in some pleasant distant woodland, or on a cliff edge fringed with delicate heather. The way Archie saw it, country people should die in the country and city people should die in the city. Only proper. In death as he was in life and all that. It made sense that Archibald should die on this nasty urban street where he had ended up, living alone at the age of forty-seven, in a one-bedroomed flat above a deserted chip shop. He wasn't the type to make elaborate plans - suicide notes and funeral instructions- he wasn't the type for anything fancy. All he asked for was a bit of silence, a bit of shushso he could concentrate. He wanted it to be perfectly quiet and still, like the inside of an empty confessional box or the moment in the brain between thought and speech. He wanted to do it before the shops opened. Overhead, a gang of the local flying vermin took off from some unseen perch, swooped, and seemed to be zeroing in on Archie's car roof - only with the elegance of a curve ball and landing on the Hussein-Ishmael, a celebrated halal butchers. Archie was too far gone to make a big noise about it, but he watched them with a warm internal smile as they deposited their load, streaking white walls purple. He watched them stretch their peering bird heads over the Hussein-Ishmael gutter; he watched them watch the slow and steady draining of blood from the dead things - chickens, cows, sheep - hanging on their hooks like coats around the shop. The Unlucky. These pigeons had an instinct for the Unlucky, and so they passed Archie by. For, though he did not know it, and despite the Hoover tube that lay on the passenger seat pumping from they exhaust pipe into his lungs, luck was with him that morning. The thinnest covering of luck was on him like fresh dew. Whilst he slipped in and out of consciousness, the position of the planets, the music of the spheres, the flap of a tigermoth's diaphanous wings in Central Africa, and a whole bunch of other stuff that Makes Shit Happen had decided it was second-chance time for Archie. Somewhere, somehow, by somebody, it had been decided that he would live.