White Teeth

A Novel

By: Zadie Smith

Narrated by: Lenny Henry, Pippa Bennett-Warner, Ray Panthaki, Arya Sagar

Length: 18 hrs and 38 mins

Publisher's summary

Zadie Smith’s dazzling debut caught critics grasping for comparisons and deciding on everyone from Charles Dickens to Salman Rushdie to John Irving and Martin Amis. But the truth is that Zadie Smith’s voice is remarkably, fluently, and altogether wonderfully her own.

At the center of this invigorating novel are two unlikely friends, Archie Jones and Samad Iqbal. Hapless veterans of World War II, Archie and Samad and their families become agents of England’s irrevocable transformation. A second marriage to Clara Bowden, a beautiful, albeit tooth-challenged, Jamaican half his age, quite literally gives Archie a second lease on life, and produces Irie, a knowing child whose personality doesn’t quite match her name (Jamaican for “no problem”). Samad’s late-in-life arranged marriage (he had to wait for his bride to be born) produces twin sons whose separate paths confound Iqbal’s every effort to direct them, and a renewed, if selective, submission to his Islamic faith. Set against London's racial and cultural tapestry, venturing across the former empire and into the past as it barrels toward the future, White Teeth revels in the ecstatic hodgepodge of modern life, flirting with disaster, confounding expectations, and embracing the comedy of daily existence.

©2000 Zadie Smith (P)2018 Random House Audio

Critic reviews

"Zadie Smith's fizzing first novel is about how we all got here - from the Caribbean, from the Indian subcontinent, from 13th place in a long-ago Olympic bicycle race - and about what 'here' turned out to be. It's an astonishingly assured debut, funny and serious, and the voice has real writerly idiosyncrasy. I was delighted by White Teeth and often impressed. It has...bite." (Salman Rushdie)

"A rich, ambitious, and often hilarious delight." (The Independent)

"This is a strikingly clever and funny book with a passion for ideas, for language, and for the rich tragicomedy of life.... [Smith's] characters always ring true; it is her ebullient, simple prose and her generous understanding of human nature that make Zadie Smith's novel outstanding. It is not only great fun to read, but full of hope." (Sunday Telegraph)