Melville House Books

A bizarre situation depicted in Zadie Smith‘s 2000 bestseller White Teeth has come true: In a “paternity suit that not even DNA testing can solve,” David Smith reports in an Observer story, a “five-year-old boy may never know his father’s identity because his mother claims she had sex with identical twins at the time he was conceived.” The case, taking place in a Montreal courtroom, is, “a real-life rerun of a plot twist in Zadie Smith’s 2000 novel White Teeth, in which the character Irie Jones has sex with the Iqbal twins on the same day and becomes pregnant.”

Dennis Johnson is the founder of MobyLives, and the co-founder and co-publisher of Melville House.