The Fraud – Smithová Zadie (2023)

Zadie Smith’s first historical novel explores truth and fiction, Jamaica and Britain, and who gets to tell their story. In 1873, Mrs Eliza Touchet is the Scottish housekeeper and cousin by marriage of the once-famous novelist William Ainsworth, with whom she has lived for thirty years. A woman of wide-ranging interests, she is concerned with literature, justice, abolitionism, class, her cousin, his wives, and this life and the next. She is also sceptical, suspecting that Ainsworth has no talent, that his successful friend Charles Dickens is a bully and a moralist, and that England is a land of facades where nothing is quite what it seems. Meanwhile, Andrew Bogle grew up enslaved on the Hope Plantation in Jamaica. He understands the human cost of sugar, the ways the rich deceive the poor, and how easily people can be manipulated. When he finds himself in London as the star witness in a celebrated case of imposture, his future depends on telling the right story. The Tichborne Trial captivates Mrs Touchet and all of England: is Sir Roger Tichborne really who he claims to be, or is he a fraud? Based on real historical events, the novel examines fraudulence, authenticity, hypocrisy, self-deception, and the mystery of other people.