![]() ![]() Smith tends to write chunky, multi-plot novels in the Victorian style, but if you’re after something you can read in an hour or two, your best bet is her 2013 novella, The Embassy of Cambodia. Zadie Smith with her Booker-shortlisted novel On Beauty in 2005. At one poignant moment, the campus poet shares a poem titled On Beauty, kindly leant to her by Smith’s husband, Nick Laird. (In case you’re curious, White Teeth is her Pride and Prejudice, NW her Mansfield Park and Swing Time her Persuasion.) Based on EM Forster’s Howards End, the novel follows the intertwined lives of two academic families – the dignified British-Trinidanian Kipps and the chaotic British-American Belseys – at Wellington College, a liberal arts college on the US east coast. On Beauty, shortlisted for the 2005 Man Booker prize, is Smith’s Emma, which is to say, her most perfectly executed novel. White Teeth is the riotous love child of The Buddha in Suburbia and Middlemarch – full of plot twists and turns, and a world away from today’s autofiction debuts. The novel’s main characters are Alfred and Samad, two ageing second world war veterans with much younger wives, and horny rule-breaking children. The sheer brilliance, audacity and possibility of her story is the stuff of British literary legend. Smith was 21 years old and still at university when she was offered a six-figure book deal for the first 80 pages of the manuscript. ![]() There is no novel like White Teeth – both in terms of the book itself and the mythology that surrounded its publication in 2000. ![]()
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