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."
