From acclaimed and bestselling novelist Zadie Smith, a kaleidoscopic work of historical fiction set against the legal trial that divided Victorian England, about who deserves to tell their story and about who deserves 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 titlecaptivates 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 Fraudis a dazzling novel about truth and fiction, Jamaica and Britain, fraudulence and authenticity, and the mystery of other people.

Zadie Smith is the author of the novelsWhite Teeth,The Autograph Man,On Beauty,NW, andSwing Time, as well as a novella,The Embassy of Cambodia, three collections of essays,Changing My Mind,Feel Free, andIntimations,and a short story collection,Grand Union. She is also the editor ofThe Book of Other People.Smith was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2002, and was listed as one ofGranta‘s 20 Best Young British Novelists in 2003 and again in 2013.White Teethwon multiple literary awards including the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, the Whitbread First Novel Award and the Guardian First Book Award.On Beautywas shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and won the Orange Prize for Fiction, andNWwas shortlisted for the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction. Zadie Smith is currently a Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.She is a regular contributor toThe New YorkerandThe New York Review of Books.

• Publisher:Penguin Press (September 5, 2023)
• Language:English
• Hardcover:416 pages
• ISBN-10:0525558969
• ISBN-13:9780525558965
• Item Weight:1.5 pounds
• Dimensions:6.13 x 1.03 x 9.25 inches