White Teeth is audacious, ambitious, and optimistic: absolutely the right book for its time. Londoners might not have been queuing for the Millennium Experience, but we weren’t yet disillusioned with Tony Blair’s government, its rhetoric of social inclusion and the black hole between its principles and its practice. London was prosperous: a place where people from a variety of backgrounds could mix it up and make it. The Y2K bug hadn’t caused ATMs to implode as the twentieth century ticked into the twenty-first, Britain was between wars, the Chancellor was predicting an end to boom-bust cycles and stock markets around the world hit all-time highs as the dot.com bubble continued to expand. Young, brilliant, beautiful and mixed race, Smith was the perfect image for an optimistic London at the start of a new millennium. Commentators and readers alike were beguiled by the novel’s exuberance, intelligence and superb prose as well as the way the author captured the spirit of the age. Written when its author was twenty-one and published, in 2000, when she was twenty-four, Zadie Smith’s debut novel was an instant critical and popular success. You can order it direct from the publishers by clicking here. This article appears in the book London Fictions, edited by Andrew Whitehead and Jerry White – and published by Five Leaves. Lisa Gee Zadie Smith – photo: Dominique Nabokov

Zadie smith white teeth 2000