The Fraud: The Instant Sunday Times Bestseller

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Mesmerizing . . . Smith weaves Eliza’s shrewd and entertaining recollections of her life, a somber account of Bogle’s ancestry and past, brief excerpts from Ainsworth’s books, and historic trial transcripts into a seamless and stimulating mix, made all the more lively by her juxtaposing of imagination with first-and secondhand accounts and facts. The result is a triumph of historical fiction.” — Publishers Weekly (starred review) Il libro della settimana: L'impostore di Zadie Smith (Mondadori) | Il cacciatore di libri | con Alessandra Tedesco | Radio 24 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.

Smith, in her most commanding novel to date, dramatizes with all-too relevant insights crucial questions of veracity and mendacity, privilege and tyranny, survival and self, trust and betrayal . . . Smith is always a must-read, and this spectacularly entertaining and resonant historical novel will have enormous appeal.” — Booklist (starred review) Even though the last one is about Ainsworths, it reminded me of reading David Copperfield and Shirley.Smith’s characteristically expansive new novel, The Fraud, works by indirection. . .Some of what The Fraud says about our own time is troubling and meant to be so. But Smith is never solemn. . .Her curiosity seems endless, she’s willing to let the past surprise her, and though the book doesn’t offer a new form of historical fiction, I would bet that it does represent a new moment in the career of Zadie Smith.” —Michael Gorra, The New York Review of Books Eliza's character. It's complex and multi-layered, she wrestles with her conscience at times, and I would like to see more of her internal struggle. The Fraud, [Smith’s] sixth novel, is partly about an enslaved man on a Jamaican sugar plantation, and it’s a comedy: those two things at once. Few would dare; fewer could pull it off as Smith does here, mixing narrative delight with a vein of rapid, skimming satire as she sketches scenes of life in 19th-century England and the Caribbean . . . In all this multiplicity, different models of Victorian fiction are inherited and transformed . . . The Fraud is a curious combination of gloriously light, deft writing and strenuous construction . . . It slows and expands lavishly in honour of its Victorian subjects, yet its chapters are elliptical half-scenes chosen with modernist economy. Happily its eight ‘volumes’ can be bound with one spine. Here is historical fiction with all the day-lit attentiveness that Eliza hopes for: ‘stories of human beings, struggling, suffering, deluding others and themselves, being cruel to each other and kind. Usually both.’ Generous and undogmatic as ever, Smith makes room for ‘both’.”— Alexandra Harris, The Guardian

Before I begin, it helps to know that The Fraud is comprised of three main storylines: the story of Eliza Touchet, a widow, and her life with her cousin-by-marriage and writer William Ainsworth; the Tichborne trial, a wildly popular case wherein a man claimed that he was, in fact, the long presumed-dead baronet Sir Roger Tichborne; and the story of the life of Andrew Bogle, a formerly enslaved man who was one of the witnesses in the Tichborne trial. 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. has been a remarkable year for literature for many reasons, including the long-awaited return of Zadie Smith… Based on real historical events, The Fraud is a captivating look into the fraudulent and the authentic.”— Chicago Review of Books la storia della vita di Andrew Bogle, un ex schiavo che fu uno dei testimoni del processo Tichborne.Smartly rendered, true to its own time while also deeply reflective of ours, it’s a terrific novel, perhaps Smith’s finest . . . The Fraud is a novel of sublime empathy, in which the author’s voice and perspective bestow a contemporary edge. From the Claimant and his supporters to Ainsworth and Mrs. Touchet, Smith understands how much we need one another, and the consolations of narrative, true and false.” — 4Columns This kaleidoscopic novel revolves around the real-life trial of a man who, in late-nineteenth-century London, claimed to be the heir to a fortune . . . The sprawling story is filled with jabs at the hypocrisy of the upper class, characters who doubt institutions, and corollaries of the pugilistic rhetoric of contemporary populism; with characteristic brilliance, Smith makes the many parts of the tale cohere.” — The New Yorker

The 'Tichborne Trial' 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... There are multiple parts to the story. It worked best when Smith concentrated on Eliza Touchet, the cousin by marriage of William Ainsworth. Through her eyes, we get to see the “Tichborne trial” when Roger Castro, an Australian butcher attempts to prove he is the true Lord Roger Tichborne. Andrew Bogle is a former Jamaican slave who swears that the claimant is truly Lord Tichborne. There’s a whole section devoted to his past and while I get why Smith wrote it, it also took me out of the primary story. L'impostore però non mi sembra sia tra i suoi romanzi più riusciti. La trama è molto articolata ed è come se fossero tre romanzi in uno: Two bizarre court cases involving hundreds of witnesses dragged on for years and filled a sewer of conspiracy theories. The butcher’s chief legal defender was an Irish barrister named Edward Kenealy, whose shameless histrionics — “whining, ranting, swearing, sermonizing, lecturing and embarking upon incredible rhetorical tangents” — make today’s Kraken-releaser Sidney Powell look like a legal genius. Wisely, Smith offers no explicit contemporary allusions, but she hardly needs to, as the Great Claimant of our own era struts across the public stage scrambling every norm of evidence and certainty.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. the great majority of people turn out to be extraordinarily suggestible, with brains like sieves through which the truth falls. Fact and fiction meld in their minds.” Many idiots are compelled to defend the Claimant, including an Irish lawyer who appears to be modeled on Rudy Giuliani. But of all his defenders, no one is more believable, cautious or intelligent than Bogle, who knew the Claimant in Australia and has maintained, mysteriously, even in the face of legal blows to the Claimant, that the Claimant is who he says he is. As an abolitionist and student of humanity, Touchet is inexorably drawn to Bogle and begins interviewing him with the hope — after years of being on the sidelines of literary dinner conversations — of, heaven forbid, writing her own book. UPDATE: I just discovered this July, 2023, New Yorker article in which Smith describes her reasons for the book and her process of writing it over several years. Delightful and something I wish I had read before reading the book. 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.”