On New Year's morning, 1975, Archie Jones sits in his car on a London road and waits for the exhaust fumes to fill his Cavalier Musketeer station wagon. Archieβworking-class, ordinary, a failed marriage under his beltβis calling it quits, the deciding factor being the flip of a 20-pence coin. When t
White Teeth
β Scribed by Zadie Smith
- Publisher
- Vintage Books; Random House
- Year
- 2000
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 348 KB
- Category
- Fiction
- ISBN
- 0375703861
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
β¦ Synopsis
{ May 2021 - Verified ebook for complete book description, cover, table of contents, separation of book (front/ back matter, parts, and chapters), and epub format error checking. }
Paperback, 448 pages
Published 2000
Time Magazine 100 Best Novels
TheGreatestBooks.org Top 500 Ever
Smith's debut has been described as "precocious," and our volunteer readers eagerly anticipated the arrival of our reader's copies of this work. In fact, we had planned to highlight this amazing stew of a novel last season. But once we determined its May publication date, we decided that rather than promote a title a month in advance of its publication and frustrate readers who'd have to wait, we'd do so in July with our summer selections. One thing is clear: our claim of Zadie Smith as a "great new writer" is no longer a solo voice-she's since been mentioned in the same breath as Dickens and Rushdie, Proust, Hemingway and Forster (as in E.M.)!
In this remarkable novel set in postwar London, 24-year-old Smith has cleverly created an unlikely friendship between Archie Jones, a simple working-class Brit, and Samad Iqbal, a Muslim Bengali waiter in an Indian restaurant, who meet in the English army in WWII. After the war, the two commiserate over their lives and those of their children; their dreams, disappointments and expectations unfolding with riotous humor as the characters in both generations struggle to carve out their own cultural identities. As Samad himself says, " you begin to give up the very idea of belonging. Suddenly, this thing, this belonging, it seems like some long, dirty lie."
White Teeth is filled to bursting with all the sights, sounds, tastes and smells of London. Melding races and cultures with a near-perfect ear for dialogue and dialect, and weaving successfully (albeit uproariously) between themes of history, religion, faith and science, Zadie Smith's is a stunning, self-assured debut, and an unforgettable new voice in fiction.
π SIMILAR VOLUMES
Unflappable working-class Englishman, Archibald Jones, and deep-thinking, serious Bengali Muslim waiter, Samad Iqbal, first meet inside a tank in the waning days of World War II. They reunite thirty years later in North London.
SUMMARY: Zadie Smithβs 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 Smithβs voice is remarkably, fluently, and altogether wonderfully her own.At the center of this in
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, Jamai
Zadie Smiths 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 Smiths voice is remarkably, fluently, and altogether wonderfully her own. At the center of this invigor
SUMMARY: Zadie Smithβs 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 Smithβs voice is remarkably, fluently, and altogether wonderfully her own.At the center of this in