White Teeth
Smith was twenty-four when she wrote this. She captured multicultural London with more energy and intelligence than writers twice her age. Still electrifying.
North London Families
Zadie Smith's 2000 debut novel opens on New Year's Day 1975, when two middle-aged men share a kebab on a North London street. One is Archie Jones, a white English nobody. The other is Samad Iqbal, a Bangladeshi intellectual waiter. Their friendship and their families over the next twenty-five years form the spine of a comic, kaleidoscopic portrait of multicultural Britain. Samad sends one son to Bangladesh to protect his Islamic heritage; the other goes native in London. The consequences are richly absurd and touchingly human. The novel won the Whitbread First Novel Award, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and the Guardian First Book Award.
Reading White Teeth
Energy
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"This has been the century of strangers, brown, yellow and white. This has been the century of the great immigrant experiment.
"Zadie Smith
Smith wrote the novel while studying at Cambridge, submitting it as her thesis. Her agent sold it based on 80 pages while she was still a student. The bidding war was unusual for a debut by an unknown writer.
The novel was adapted into a BAFTA-winning Channel 4 miniseries in 2002. Smith has since written five more novels but White Teeth remains her most celebrated work and one of the defining British novels of its era.