White Teeth

White Teeth is the first novel of the British writer Zadie Smith, published in 2000. It won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction, the Whitbread Book Award for best first novel, the Guardian First Book Award and the Betty Trask Award, and it was adapted for television in 2002.

The book begins with a failed suicide. Archie Jones is forty-seven, his Italian wife has just left him, and the interruption that saves him leads him, by the end of the day, to a party where he meets Clara, a much younger woman from a Jamaican family. His closest friend is Samad Iqbal, a Bangladeshi immigrant he served with in the Second World War, who lives nearby with his wife and twin sons. The novel follows both families over more than twenty years, and its subject is the country they are all making a life in: the ways immigrant communities hold on to a version of home, what happens to children who inherit a religion or a heritage they did not choose, and the scientific and political ideas of the period, including genetic research and animal rights campaigns.

Smith tells the story with a large cast and a comic register that keeps moving between generations, and the book is one of the defining British novels of its decade.