Zadie Smith’s Next, The Fraud, Will Release This September – News18

Penguin Press will publish noted author Zadie Smith’s The Fraud this September. Smith’s much acclaimed first novel White Teeth made her a literary sensation in 2000. The book has been described as 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. This is Smith’s first novel since Swing Time.”

The story, set in 1873,  is about ‘Mrs. Eliza Touchet’ who “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 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 has been described as a dazzling novel about truth and fiction, Jamaica and Britain, fraudulence and authenticity and the mystery of “other people.”

Previous novels by Zadie Smith

1. White Teeth (2000)
2. The Autograph Man (2002)
3. On Beauty (2005)
4. NW (2012)
5. Swing Time (2016)