Key themes
- Immigration, identity and the comedy of belonging
- History as a weight the present can't shake
- Multi-ethnic London as a testing ground for British liberalism
About this book
Two London families across generations and cultures; a dazzling, exuberant debut about modern multicultural Britain.
Published in 2000, Smith's debut won the Whitbread First Novel Award and established her immediately as a major voice. She wrote much of it as an undergraduate at Cambridge.
Discussion questions
- The novel is funny, but the comedy is always at the edge of something painful. How does Smith use humour to say things about race, class and history that a more earnest approach could not?
- Samad Iqbal's decision about his sons is the novel's central moral catastrophe. How does Smith chart the gap between his intentions and the consequences he couldn't have predicted?
- White Teeth is set in Willesden — a specific, unglamorous part of London. What does this geographical specificity give the novel?
- The novel ends with a vision of deliberate genetic manipulation of identity. How does this science-fictional gesture relate to the novel's themes of inheritance, determinism and escape?
- Smith was 24 when she wrote the novel. Does it feel like a young writer's book — in its ambition, its energy, its occasional overreach? What do you think she gets exactly right — and what might she do differently now?
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White Teeth appears on the following curriculum reading lists.
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