Recommendations
Books Like White Teeth
Best books to read after White Teeth by Zadie Smith
Zadie Smith's White Teeth is the defining British novel of multicultural London — two families, five decades, Willesden. These recommendations continue the Zadie Smith canon, explore the tradition of the contemporary British novel of immigration and identity, or offer companion reading in the tradition of the novel that asks what it means to be British when Britain is everything at once.
- 1Buy
On Beauty
by Zadie Smith
The companion Zadie Smith novel — a comic academic novel about two feuding art-history professors, one Black American and one English, in a Massachusetts university town; Smith's second masterpiece and the novel most often cited alongside White Teeth as essential reading in her canon.
- 2Buy
NW
by Zadie Smith
The formally experimental companion Zadie Smith — a stream-of-consciousness novel about two women from the same North London council estate who have taken very different paths; the novel that most divides Zadie Smith readers and the one that most seriously tests the boundaries of what her prose can do.
- 3Buy
Swing Time
by Zadie Smith
The most recent major Zadie Smith novel — an unnamed narrator's account of her childhood friendship with a girl named Tracey and her adult work for a celebrity; explores race, class, and female friendship across London, New York, and West Africa.
- 4Buy
Brick Lane
by Monica Ali
The companion novel of South Asian immigrant life in East London — Nazneen's arranged marriage and her life in the Bangladeshi community of Tower Hamlets; the other defining novel of British multiculturalism from the same moment as White Teeth, and the novel most often read alongside it in university courses.
- 5Buy
Small Island
by Andrea Levy
The Windrush generation companion — two couples, two countries (Jamaica and England), and the first wave of Caribbean immigration to postwar Britain; the Orange Prize-winning novel that traces the beginning of the multicultural Britain that White Teeth depicts in its later, settled form.
- 6Buy
Americanah
by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
The companion trans-Atlantic identity novel — a Nigerian woman's experience of race and identity in America and Britain; shares White Teeth's interest in how immigration reshapes identity and how the categories of race work differently in different national contexts.
- 7Buy
The Kite Runner
by Khaled Hosseini
The companion novel of immigration and cultural dislocation — Amir's journey from Afghanistan to California, exploring what is lost and what is transformed when people leave their home country and build new lives in the West; shares White Teeth's interest in the relationship between family history and cultural identity.
- 8Buy
Invisible Man
by Ralph Ellison
The canonical predecessor in the tradition of the novel about racial invisibility — Ellison's unnamed narrator in mid-century America; the literary ancestor of White Teeth's exploration of what it means to be seen only as your race or ethnicity rather than as an individual.
More White Teeth Resources
More Reading Recommendations
View all →Monthly Newsletter
Never miss a big release
Get the most anticipated upcoming books delivered to your inbox once a month — no spam, no filler.
Monthly only. Unsubscribe anytime.
Book links are Amazon affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate, BookReleaseRadar earns from qualifying purchases at no extra cost to you.