Book of the Year 2023 according to New York Times New Yorker Guardian Economist Observer
The Spectator Financial Times Vogue The Times The Oldie i Paper The Standard Washington
Post Independent Daily Express SHORTLISTED FOR WATERSTONES BOOK OF THE YEAR 2023
SHORTLISTED FOR THE WRITERS' PRIZE FOR FICTION 2024 ONE OF SARAH JESSICA PARKER'S BEST BOOKS OF
2023 LONGLISTED FOR THE WALTER SCOTT PRIZE FOR HISTORICAL FICTION 2024 'A writer at the peak
of her powers' The Telegraph Truth and fiction. Jamaica and Britain. Who gets to tell their
story? Zadie Smith returns with her first historical novel. 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. Mrs
Touchet is a woman of many interests: literature justice abolitionism class her novelist
cousin and his wives this life and the next. But she is also sceptical. She suspects England
of being a land of façades in which nothing is quite what it seems. 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.
Based on real historical events The Fraud is a dazzling novel about how in a world of
hypocrisy and self-deception deciding what's true can prove a complicated task. 'It's
difficult to give any idea of how extraordinary this book is. One of the great historical
novels certainly. But has any historical novel ever combined such brilliantly researched and
detailed history with such intensely imagined fiction? Or such a range of living breathing
surprising characters with such an idiosyncratically structured narrative?' Michael Frayn
'As always it is a pleasure to be in Zadie Smith's mind which as time goes on is becoming
contiguous with London itself. Dickens may be dead but Smith thankfully is alive' New York
Times 'Zadie Smith's Victorian-set masterpiece holds a mirror up to Britain . . . The Fraud
is the genuine article' Independent 'Smith's dazzling historical novel combines deft writing
and strenuous construction in a tale of literary London and the horrors of slavery' Guardian
Instant Sunday Times bestseller September 2023
