White Teeth
by Zadie Smith
This has been the century of strangers, brown, yellow and white. This has been the century of the great immigrant experiment.
Why read it
Two old war buddies, one English and one Bangladeshi, raise their tangled families in multicultural London. Across three generations, roots and rebellion, faith and science, collide in gloriously messy fashion.
White Teeth follows the Joneses, the Iqbals, and the Chalfens as immigrant history, religious fervor, and modern science braid together in late-twentieth-century London. Zadie Smith writes a big, comic, generous novel about identity, inheritance, and the impossibility of escaping where you come from. It captures a changing Britain with wit and enormous heart.
Zadie Smith wrote White Teeth largely while still a student at Cambridge, and it was published in 2000 to enormous acclaim when she was only twenty-four. It won several awards including the Whitbread First Novel Award and the Guardian First Book Award. The novel became a defining portrait of multicultural London at the turn of the millennium.
- 01
The weight of roots
Every character struggles with an inheritance, ethnic, religious, or familial, they cannot simply shed.
- 02
Faith and fundamentalism
The novel traces how the search for certainty can harden into extremism across a generation.
- 03
Science and control
A genetics subplot asks whether the future can be engineered or whether chaos always wins.
- 04
Comedy of belonging
Its warmth comes from finding hilarity and humanity in the clash of cultures.
Archie Jones's botched suicide attempt on New Year's morning, interrupted by a halal butcher, which opens the novel on a note of absurd second chances.
The chaotic public finale around the launch of the genetically engineered FutureMouse, where every storyline collides at once.
