Horizon Information Portal

e-branch

Home

My Account/Renew Loans

Find Magazine Articles & more

White teeth / Zadie Smith.

by Smith, Zadie.

View full image

Hamish Hamilton, c2000.

Jamaicans -- England -- Fiction.

Immigrants -- England -- Fiction.

Male friendship -- Fiction.

Ethnic relations -- Fiction.

Muslim families -- Fiction.

London (England) -- Fiction.

9780241981399 (2017 Penguin mass mkt. pbk.)

0241141028 (trade paperback)

9780140276336 (Penguin trade pbk.)

9780375703867 (2001 Vintage International trade pbk.)

541 p. ; 20 cm.

The book's home base is a scrubby North London borough, where we encounter Smith's unlikely heroes: prevaricating Archie Jones and intemperate Samad Iqbal, who served together in the so-called Buggered Battalion during World War II. In the ensuing decades, both have gone forth and multiplied: Archie marries beautiful, bucktoothed Clara--who's on the run from her Jehovah's Witness mother--and fathers a daughter. Samad marries stroppy Alsana, who gives birth to twin sons. Here is multiculturalism in its most elemental form: "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. Even a simple exchange between Alsana and Clara about their pregnancies has a comical ring of truth

Winner of the 2000 Whitbread First Novel Award.

Winner of the Guardian First Book Award.

Winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction.

Humorous fiction.

Horizon Information Portal 3.24_8902M

© 2001-2013 SirsiDynix All rights reserved.

Horizon Information Portal