**NATIONAL BESTSELLER - The blockbuster debut novel from "a
preternaturally gifted" writer (The New York Times ) and author of
Swing Time--set against London's racial and cultural tapestry,
reveling in the ecstatic hodgepodge of modern life, flirting with
disaster, and embracing the comedy of daily existence.
Zadie Smith's dazzling debut caught critics grasping for comparisons and
deciding on everyone from Charles Dickens to Salman Rushdie to John
Irving and Martin Amis. But the truth is that Zadie Smith's voice is
remarkably, fluently, and altogether wonderfully her own.
At the center of this invigorating novel are two unlikely friends,
Archie Jones and Samad Iqbal. Hapless veterans of World War II, Archie
and Samad and their families become agents of England's irrevocable
transformation. A second marriage to Clara Bowden, a beautiful, albeit
tooth-challenged, Jamaican half his age, quite literally gives Archie a
second lease on life, and produces Irie, a knowing child whose
personality doesn't quite match her name (Jamaican for "no problem").
Samad's late-in-life arranged marriage (he had to wait for his bride to
be born), produces twin sons whose separate paths confound Iqbal's every
effort to direct them, and a renewed, if selective, submission to his
Islamic faith.
