White Teeth is a 2000 novel by the British author Zadie Smith. It focuses on the lives of two wartime friends - the Bengali Samad Iqbal and the Englishman Archie Jones and their families in Britain.
Archie marries Clara, having met her on a staircase on New Year's Day, and they have a girl, Irie. Samad, on the other hand, emigrates to Britain after World War II, marries the much-younger Alsana, and they have two twin boys. Separated as children, one of the boys becomes pious and unemotional whilst the other becomes angry and fundamentalist.
The story mixes pathos and humour, all the while illustrating the dilemmas of immigrants as they are confronted by a new, and very different, society.
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