White Teeth

Archie Jones attempts suicide on New Year's Day 1975, is stopped by a Halal butcher, and by evening has married Clara Bowden, a Jamaican woman twenty years his junior.

We meet Samad and Alsana Iqbal, established in London, where Samad works as a waiter despite his education, rages against his diminished life, and begins an affair with his sons' schoolteacher.

Smith interweaves the historical 1857 Rebellion with Archie and Samad's wartime friendship in Bulgaria/North Africa, establishing the deep structure of history-as-burden that underlies the whole novel.

Irie Jones, fifteen, battles her body, her hair, and her desire to belong, while beginning to understand the hidden depths of her grandmother Clara's Jamaican past.

Millat, the twin kept in London, drifts through adolescence as a cool, bad-boy heartthrob before encountering Islamic radicalism through the organization KEVIN, and beginning his transformation into a militant.

Irie and Millat fall into the orbit of the Chalfen family — a hyper-articulate, secularly Jewish intellectual family — and both are simultaneously attracted to and warped by what the Chalfens represent.

Magid returns from Bangladesh as a rational, suit-wearing scientist. Millat has become a radical Islamist. The twin reversal is complete. Their father Samad must reckon with what his choice has made.

All threads converge on Marcus Chalfen's FutureMouse demonstration. KEVIN plans assassination. Archie again throws himself in the path of a bullet. The mouse escapes. The novel insists on the unscripted future.