The New York Times bestseller • One of the New York Times 10 Best Books of the Year • One of NPR’s Best Books of the Year • Named a Best Book of the Year by Publishers Weekly and BookPage • One of Oprah Daily’s Best Novels of 2023
[A] brilliant new entry in Smith’s catalog… The Fraud is not a change for Smith, but a demonstration of how expansive her talents are.
- Los Angeles Times
From acclaimed and bestselling novelist Zadie Smith, a kaleidoscopic work of historical fiction set against the legal trial that divided Victorian England, about who gets to tell their story - and who gets to be believed
It is 1873. Mrs. Eliza Touchet is the Scottish housekeeper - and cousin by marriage - of a once-famous novelist, now in decline, William Ainsworth, with whom she has lived for thirty years.
Mrs. Touchet is a woman of many interests: literature, justice, abolitionism, class, her cousin, his wives, this life and the next. But she is also sceptical. She suspects her cousin of having no talent; his successful friend, Mr. Charles Dickens, of being a bully and a moralist; and England of being a land of facades, in which nothing is quite what it seems.
Andrew Bogle, meanwhile, grew up enslaved on the Hope Plantation, Jamaica. He knows every lump of sugar comes at a human cost. That the rich deceive the poor. And that people are more easily manipulated than they realize. When Bogle finds himself in London, star witness in a celebrated case of imposture, he knows his future depends on telling the right story.
The “Tichborne Trial” - wherein a lower-class butcher from Australia claimed he was in fact the rightful heir of a sizable estate and title - captivates Mrs. Touchet and all of England. Is Sir Roger Tichborne really who he says he is? Or is he a fraud? Mrs. Touchet is a woman of the world. Mr. Bogle is no fool. But in a world of hypocrisy and self-deception, deciding what is real proves a complicated task… .
Based on real historical events, The Fraud is a dazzling novel about truth and fiction, Jamaica and Britain, fraudulence and authenticity and the mystery of “other people.”