Wasafiri Magazine

1 month ago | wasafiri.org | Maya Jaggi

In a Guardian review twelve years ago of Zadie Smith’s White Teeth, rather than hailing a fresh ‘voice’ in fiction, I doffed my hat as a fellow Londoner-born-and-bred to a thrillingly acute new ear. The Babel of her debut novel was an ebullient rendering of changes wrought in the city’s language and landscape by an unfolding epic of postwar arrival and flux.