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? In her first historical novel Zadie Smith transports the reader to a Victorian
England transfixed by the real-life trial of the Tichborne Claimant in which a cockney butcher
recently returned from Australia lays claim to the Tichborne baronetcy with his former slave
Andrew Bogle as star witness. Watching the proceedings and with her own story to tell is
Eliza Touchet - cousin housekeeper and perhaps more - to failing novelist William Harrison
Ainsworth. From literary London to the Jamaica's sugar-cane plantations Zadie Smith weaves an
enthralling story linking the rich and the poor the free and the enslaved and the comic and
the tragic. '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?' Michael Frayn 'As
always it is a pleasure to be in Zadie Smith's mind . . . 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
