White Teeth

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  • Author: Zadie Smith
  • Publisher: Penguin
  • Catalogue: 135365
Zadie Smith's White Teeth is a funny, generous, big-hearted novel on a scrambled, heterogeneous sprawl of mixed-race and immigrant family life in 20th-century gritty London.

It follows the roots and the lives of three families: the Iqbals, the Jones' and the Chalfens. With an interesting concoction of cultures, ranging from the Radio-4-listening, herbal-tea-drinking Chalfens, to the Bengali, strict muslim Iqbals, Zadie Smith generates a colourful and exciting picture of West London.

With a perfect ear for the nuances of identity and social position, Smith takes on race, sex, class, history, religion, the classic immigrant fears of dilution and disappearance, and the minefield of gender politics. And such is her wit and inventiveness that these weighty subjects seem effortlessly light. Dipping into the ancestry of characters along the way, White Teeth provides humorous, well-rounded and thoughtful accounts of all of its protagonists. They aren't heroic, just real: warm, funny, misguided, and entirely familiar.

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.