https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2020/jul/21/white-teeth-transcends-flaws-zadie-smith

Zadie Smith is the first to cringe at her story’s excesses – but her novel’s vigour and invention leave readers rightly undeterred

Famously, Zadie Smith sold White Teeth for £250,000 on the back of an 80-page-extract. She once told the story on the BBC’s World Book Club:

“I’d written what was meant to be a short story – which was kind of the first two chapters. I got a letter from this publisher who’d read a short story of mine in an Oxbridge collection of short fiction … He said have you got anything longer and I sent him what I had of this long story and that was that … And the scary thing was then being told I had to finish it and write this novel.”