The Fraud
The instant Sunday Times bestseller
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3.4 • 23 Ratings
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
Book of the Year 2023 according to New York Times, New Yorker, Guardian, Economist, Observer, The Spectator, Financial Times, Vogue, The Times, The Oldie, i Paper, The Standard, Washington Post, Independent, Daily Express
SHORTLISTED FOR WATERSTONES BOOK OF THE YEAR 2023
SHORTLISTED FOR THE WRITERS’ PRIZE FOR FICTION 2024
ONE OF SARAH JESSICA PARKER’S BEST BOOKS OF 2023
LONGLISTED FOR THE WALTER SCOTT PRIZE FOR HISTORICAL FICTION 2024
‘A writer at the peak of her powers’ The Telegraph
Truth and fiction. Jamaica and Britain. Who gets to tell their story?
In her first historical novel, Zadie Smith transports the reader to a Victorian England transfixed by the real-life trial of the Tichborne Claimant, in which a cockney butcher, recently returned from Australia, lays claim to the Tichborne baronetcy, with his former slave Andrew Bogle as star witness. Watching the proceedings, and with her own story to tell, is Eliza Touchet – cousin, housekeeper and perhaps more – to failing novelist William Harrison Ainsworth.
From literary London to the Jamaica’s sugar-cane plantations, Zadie Smith weaves an enthralling story linking the rich and the poor, the free and the enslaved, and the comic and the tragic.
‘It’s difficult to give any idea of how extraordinary this book is. One of the great historical novels, certainly. But has any historical novel ever combined such brilliantly researched and detailed history with such intensely imagined fiction?' Michael Frayn
‘As always it is a pleasure to be in Zadie Smith’s mind . . . Dickens may be dead, but Smith, thankfully, is alive’ New York Times
‘Zadie Smith’s Victorian-set masterpiece holds a mirror up to Britain . . . The Fraud is the genuine article’ Independent
‘Smith’s dazzling historical novel combines deft writing and strenuous construction in a tale of literary London and the horrors of slavery’ Guardian
Instant Sunday Times bestseller, September 2023
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Smith's mesmerizing latest (after the essay collection Feel Free) centers on a real-life Victorian cause célèbre involving a man who claims to be a long-lost English aristocrat. The story opens in 1873, when Scottish widow Eliza Touchet (like most of the novel's characters, a historical figure) has spent four decades as the housekeeper for novelist William Ainsworth, her cousin by marriage. One of her distractions from her unrewarding life is the highly publicized controversy surrounding the so-called Tichborne Claimant. English aristocrat Roger Tichborne is believed to have drowned off the Brazilian coast in 1854. Twelve years later, however, a man who says he's Sir Roger begins a lengthy attempt to claim the Tichborne title and fortune. As a spectator at the 1871 civil trial the claimant initiates to establish his identity, Eliza doubts his story yet instinctively believes one of the witnesses on his behalf, a formerly enslaved man named Andrew Bogle. After the jury rules against the claimant and he is arrested for perjury and fraud, Eliza introduces herself to Bogle. An abolitionist, she's moved by his dignity and vulnerability, and persuades him to tell her his story. In the process, she realizes that she, like Ainsworth, is a writer. Smith weaves Eliza's shrewd and entertaining recollections of her life, a somber account of Bogle's ancestry and past, brief excerpts from Ainsworth's books, and historic trial transcripts into a seamless and stimulating mix, made all the more lively by her juxtaposing of imagination with first- and secondhand accounts and facts. The result is a triumph of historical fiction.
Customer Reviews
Can do better
3.5 stars
The author is a multi-award winning British novelist, essayist, and public intellectual and, until recently, professor at NYU. She once said in an interview that she moved to America because if she’d stayed in London she would have ended up writing an historical novel. Along came Covid. She moved back to London, and wrote an historical novel!
The setting is Victorian England. The main character is Eliza Touchet, the Scottish cousin/ housekeeper/confidante of novelist and publisher William Ainsworth, who was bigger than Dickens back in the day, at least for a while. Eliza is also an abolitionist. Ainsworth’s career is in decline when we meet him, unlike that of Dickens. Much of the action, such as it is, occurs around the time of the Tichbourne fraud trial (Google it), which provides a second narrative thread, although Ms Smith flashes forward and back in time a fair bit to keep readers on their toes. A third thread centres on a black Jamaican former servant (read slave) of the aforementioned Tichbourne, who is a witness at the trial. This dovetails with Eliza’s abolitionism and allows Ms Smith to comment on race relations of the period. (Not good)
The book is divided into eight parts, perhaps in homage to Middlemarch, although the resemblance ends there because the chapters are extremely short and chop back and forth in time and between narrative streams: not a feature of Victorian fiction as I recall. The author helps readers out with dated chapter heading sometimes, other times not.
Ms Smith’s prose is as good or better than anything else published in the last 30 years, and she obviously did considerable research. Unfortunately, the plot goes nowhere, which is disappointing.