Author: Zadie Smith
Publisher: Penguin
Year: 2000
Language: English
Pages: 461
ISBN/UPC (if available): N/A
Description
A sparkling comic epic of multicultural Britain.
Meet the Joneses, the Iqbals and the Chalfens, living in a small borough of North London at the fag end of the twentieth century. Different colors, different religions and on different ides of the unforgettable colonial fence, they re all yet English to varying degrees and involved in each other's lives in every conceivable way.
At the epicentre lies the helpless Archibald Jones, who can't make a decision about flipping a coin; an Everyman with no distinguishing features - apart from consistency. It is this quality which cements his friendship with Samad Iqbal who came to England in the immigrant wave of the 1970s. It is what keeps him married to Clara, a beautiful black girl half his ago who married him by accident. It is what ties the Jones and Iqbal clans together over fifty years. But when the Chalfens arrive on the scene - a family with some interesting plans for the future of the planet, not to mention the Jones and Iqbal children - Archie's laisez-faire attitude is tested to the limit, and the second generation begin to have plans of their own.
COMMENT: An astonishingly assured debut, funny and serious . . It has bite. - Salman Rushdie