The Fraud

Genre

Literary Fiction

Publisher

Penguin Press

Publication year

2023

ISBN

9780525558965

The Fraud, Zadie Smith's first historical novel, centers on Eliza Touchet, a Scottish housekeeper to a fading Victorian novelist, as she follows the real Tichborne Claimant trial, in which a butcher claimed to be a missing aristocrat. Set in nineteenth-century England, the book connects...

England, the 1870s: a coarse Australian butcher insists he is a drowned aristocrat, and the nation, thrillingly, cannot decide whether to believe him. Around this real Victorian sensation Zadie Smith builds her first historical novel, seen largely through Eliza Touchet, the sharp-eyed Scottish housekeeper of a once-celebrated, now-mediocre writer. Smith uses the trial as a prism for a culture besotted with spectacle and self-deception, and - through the testimony of a formerly enslaved Jamaican witness - she widens the frame to the empire's buried crimes. The result is capacious and digressive by design, alive with literary gossip, class friction and moral unease about who gets believed and why. Readers who admire the contemporary Smith of NW will find her wit and social acuity intact, redirected to the nineteenth century and to uncomfortable rhymes with our own age of populist untruth. Erudite, mischievous and quietly angry, The Fraud is finally a novel about fiction itself - its uses, its dangers, and the stories a society agrees to tell.