The Fraud
A Novel
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3.7 • 144 Ratings
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
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.”
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Acclaimed author Zadie Smith’s first historical work is both a sly pastiche of Victorian novels and an utterly absorbing, exciting story that weaves together three interconnected tales set in Scotland, England, and Jamaica. Eliza Touchet is a London housekeeper who has taken on some radical social and political ideas while in the employ of a best-selling novelist whose closest frenemy is none other than Charles Dickens. Andrew Bogle is a Black man from Jamaica, a cynical formerly enslaved person who realizes that little about his life has changed since abolition. Both characters are drawn into a court case based on one of the biggest news stories of mid-1870s London. In her previous stories, Smith has explored topics like colonialism, identity, and human rights through modern-day London life; in this book, she does the same thing using the past. That makes The Fraud less of a departure than it might seem at first.
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
My First Smith Novel
Smith’s writing is so beautiful. And the dialogue! Some of the middle sections veered too far from the center but it was a minor wobble in an otherwise fantastic book.
Quite an interesting read
The stories of the lives of William Ainsworth, Eliza Touchet, Sir Roger Tichborne and Andrew Bogle all intertwined to give us quite an interesting read and a unique novel…yet overly complex with no sense of real purpose.
Fitfully interesting, ultimately disappointing
What started as a satire of dreary, bloated Dickensian novels becomes one midway through. Too much shifting of chronology and perspective; the overlong Jamaican section is a tedious digression. A book only fans of Dickens could love.