num_pages: 462
description: 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
language: English
title: White Teeth
titlecomplete: White Teeth
characters: Millat Zulfikar Iqbal, Mr Topps, Samad Miah Iqbal, Irie Ambrosia Jones, Clara Bowden, Joyce Chalfen, Hortense Bowden, Marcus Chalfen, Magid Iqbal, Alfred Archibald Jones, Joshua Chalfen, Alsana Begum
genres: Literature, Classics, Literary Fiction, Novels, Historical Fiction, Fiction, Race, Adult Fiction, Contemporary, British Literature
ratings_count: 152146
places: London, England, England
awards: awardedAt: 946713600000
name: Orange Prize
category: Fiction Shortlist, awardedAt: 946713600000
name: Guardian First Book Award, awardedAt: 946713600000
name: James Tait Black Memorial Prize
category: Fiction, awardedAt: 946713600000
name: Whitbread Award
category: First Novel, awardedAt: 946713600000
name: John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, awardedAt: 978336000000
name: Puddly Award
category: Debut Novel, awardedAt: 946713600000
name: National Book Critics Circle Award
category: Fiction, awardedAt: 978336000000
name: Commonwealth Writers' Prize
category: Best First Book Overall, awardedAt: 978336000000
name: Sunday Times/Peters Fraser + Dunlop Young Writer of the Year Award, awardedAt: 978336000000
name: Betty Trask Award
publisher: Hamish Hamilton.