The Fraud

By Zadie Smith

Categories: Literature & Fiction

The Fraud (2023) is Zadie Smith's historical novel, built around the Tichborne case, in which a butcher from Australia claimed to be the lost heir to an English baronetcy. Eliza Touchet, the sharp-witted Scottish housekeeper and cousin of the fading novelist William Harrison Ainsworth, becomes absorbed by the trial and by Andrew Bogle, a Jamaican man born into slavery who is the claimant's star witness. Smith sets Eliza's domestic life in London against Bogle's account of his own history, asking who gets believed and why.

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• Sarah Jessica Parker: “[Best books of 2023] They are all glorious, radically and wonderfully different from one another, and simply share one ingredient - supremely gifted authors.”