AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER *SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2024 WRITERS' PRIZE FOR FICTION* Named a Best Book of 2023 by The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Walrus, and Publishers Weekly 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. He knows 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.”

At the center of The Fraud is a court case about the true identity of a man who claims to be a lost member of nobility and the allies and onlookers surrounding that scandal. Two characters anchor this study, Eliza Touchet who lives with a once-famous but now washed up writer and watches the trials, and Andrew Bogle, a formerly enslaved person from Jamaica who has become one of the main advocates for the claimant to the noble title. In those sections, Smith tells a shockingly relevant story to our age of misinformation and cult-like politics. It's astounding how many parallels there are to modern MAGA style movements. Similarly, Bogle's story from Jamaica to his travels around the world is well told and compelling. The issue we had with the novel is that none of this starts in earnest until more than halfway through the book. The first half of the novel is all about Eliza's life with the writer and his wife and his literary circle, exploring the bisexual affairs she had and how her writer rose and fall alongside the better and more famous writers of that time. While there are some interesting ideas about ethics and loyalty there, we all just felt like we didn't need so many pages of that description. Also, we had a lot of structural issues with that first section. Chapters are extremely short and scenes often extend through chapter breaks such that there doesn't seem to be any reason to separate them. At the same time, Smith doesn't follow a linear timeline and moves back and forth to different moments in Eliza's life with no warning and little cuing. All of this made the beginning of the novel long, confusing, and choppy. The conclusion of the novel also felt a bit unearned, with a monologue about racism and revolution from Bogle's son that didn't get a proper build up in the story. But Eliza's own arc, of realizing she had an inheritance from her dead husband to her choice of how to resolve it, led to a great debate in our club about how much Eliza was acting ethically as opposed to dodging problems. Overall, there are good things in The Fraud that are very present today, and we acknowledge that Smith did a great job with those elements, but we wish someone had edited this to a shorter and more concise novel on those topics.