White Teeth (2003)

In-fiction date: 1/1/1975

On New Year's Day 1975, Archie Jones sits in his car in a Camden side street with a rubber hose from the exhaust pipe — but is interrupted by the furious proprietor of a halal butcher's who objects to someone dying in front of his shop. Saved from suicide by pure comic circumstance, Archie goes that evening to meet Clara Bowden at a party, and Zadie Smith's multigenerational novel of two London families begins.