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 who deserves to be believed It is 1873.
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.. . . .
But in a world of hypocrisy and self-deception, deciding what is real proves a complicated task.
Bogle is no fool.
Mr.
Touchet is a woman of the world.
Is Sir Roger Tichborne really who he says he is? Or is he a fraud? Mrs.
Touchet and all of England.
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.
When Bogle finds himself in London, star witness in a celebrated case of imposture, he knows his future depends on telling the right story.
And that people are more easily manipulated than they realize.
That the rich deceive the poor.
He knows every lump of sugar comes at a human cost.
Andrew Bogle, meanwhile, grew up enslaved on the Hope Plantation, Jamaica.
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.
She suspects her cousin of having no talent; his successful friend, Mr.
But she is also sceptical.
Touchet is a woman of many interests: literature, justice, abolitionism, class, her cousin, his wives, this life and the next.
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.
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 who deserves to be believed It is 1873
