The Fraud

Zadie Smith is the author of the novels <i>White Teeth</i> <i>The Autograph Man</i> <i>On Beauty</i> <i>NW </i>and<i> Swing Time</i>; as well as a novella <i>The Embassy of Cambodia</i>; three collections of essays <i>Changing My Mind Feel Free</i> and <i>Intimations</i>; a collection of short stories <i>Grand Union</i>; and the play <i>The Wife of Willesden</i> adapted from Chaucer. She is also the editor of <i>The Book of Other People</i>. Zadie Smith was born in north-west London where she still lives. <i>The Fraud</i> is her first historical novel. No one understands humans better. As this novel shows there is no better guide to people and their bottomlessness than Smith herself This was really delightful. 10/10. Zadie Smith is a genius A novel full of people ideas humour feeling and something like moral truth – the stuff of life Searingly original [and] virtuosic . . . the book masterfully depicts post-emancipation Britain as it ruptures along faultlines of class and race Brilliant. A Dickensian delight <p><b>‘A writer at the peak of her powers’ </b><i><b>The Telegraph</b></i><br><br><b>Truth and fiction. Jamaica and Britain. Who gets to tell their story? Zadie Smith returns with her first historical novel.</b><br><br>Kilburn 1873. The 'Tichborne Trial' has captivated the widowed Scottish housekeeper Mrs Eliza Touchet and all of England. Readers are at odds over whether the defendant is who he claims to be - or an imposter.<br><br>Mrs Touchet is a woman of many interests: literature justice abolitionism class her novelist cousin and his wives this life and the next. But she is also sceptical. She suspects England of being a land of façades in which nothing is quite what it seems.<br><br>Andrew Bogle meanwhile finds himself the star witness his future depending on telling the right story. Growing 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 realise.<br><br>Based on real historical events <i>The Fraud </i>is a dazzling novel about how in a world of hypocrisy and self-deception deciding what's true can prove a complicated task.<br><br><b>‘As always it is a pleasure to be in Zadie Smith’s mind which as time goes on is becoming contiguous with London itself. Dickens may be dead but Smith thankfully is alive’ <i>New York Times</i><br><br>‘Zadie Smith’s Victorian-set masterpiece holds a mirror up to Britain . . . <i>The Fraud </i>is the genuine article’ <i>Independent</i><br><br>‘Smith’s dazzling historical novel combines deft writing and strenuous construction in a tale of literary London and the horrors of slavery’ <i>Guardian</i></b></p>