The Fraud: The Instant Sunday Times Bestseller

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A] brilliant new entry in Smith’s catalog . . . The Fraud is not a change for Smith, but a demonstration of how expansive her talents are.”— Los Angeles Times But Smith’s age at the time — 26 — must have felt positively geriatric to me. It was only when I started publishing in my 20s that I could appreciate what a prodigy Smith was; and throughout my career she has remained a startling (and despair-inducing) beacon of what a writer can achieve at a young age. An undergraduate when she embarked on “White Teeth,” she was not yet 30 when she published — to my mind — her masterpiece, “On Beauty,” a wise, sad and hilarious book about American race relations that would have justly been called a great American social novel had the American literary scene at that time been more attuned to race as a theme. la storia della vita di Andrew Bogle, un ex schiavo che fu uno dei testimoni del processo Tichborne. 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

How about Eliza's growing social consciousness? Without any narrative ramifications -- for instance, if she was arrested at a violent protest -- it's character development, not a story. Mesmerizing . . . Smith weaves Eliza’s shrewd and entertaining recollections of her life, a somber account of Bogle’s ancestry and past, brief excerpts from Ainsworth’s books, and historic trial transcripts into a seamless and stimulating mix, made all the more lively by her juxtaposing of imagination with first-and secondhand accounts and facts. The result is a triumph of historical fiction.” — Publishers Weekly (starred review) Overall I feel like this is a book of parts or pieces that never quite completely fit together. This could have easily been three books which could have sunk more deeply into these questions and perhaps captured and held my interest.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. In the 1860s, a butcher with a shadowy past claimed that he was Sir Roger Tichborne, the presumed-dead son of Lady Tichborne and the heir to a vast fortune. The evidence against the butcher seemed overwhelming: He could not remember his supposed classmates, could not recall basic facts of a gentleman’s education and could not even speak French, Tichborne’s first language. More damning, details about his “missing years” at sea were shown to be false. And yet for many thousands of devoted fans, the very audaciousness of his claim argued in its favor.

But. This is a novel, and the novelist’s intelligence is drawn in idiosyncratic directions. What makes “The Fraud” a book by Zadie Smith and not, say, a transcript of the trial is that the central characters are not the jury or the judged, but a 60-ish Scottish widow named Eliza Touchet and an elderly, formerly enslaved Jamaican named Andrew Bogle who is serving as a witness for the Claimant. It pains me to give a Zadie Smith book 3 stars! I'm not even sure what to say about this latest by one of my favorite authors. Smith has long been fascinated by, and is expertly attuned to, the authority and status conferred on those who can wield language entertainingly or persuasively. This is the novelist’s prowess—and the politician’s and the swindler’s. . . . Over and over, The Fraud insists on the duty of the novelist to deeply imagine the other—a project that may be doomed to fail but remains worth attempting. Smith was a convincing mouthpiece for this argument in The New York Review of Books not simply because she’s a persuasive critic but because she has made a career writing novels that do this well.”— Jordan Kisner, The AtlanticMaybe Smith has the Maggie O'Farrell effect on me. Which is to say, I love both of these authors' contemporary works, but not as much their historical ones. Warmest thanx to Random House Canada, Netgalley and the incredible Zadie herself. This will be released September 5, 2023. I am providing an honest review. I would get caught up in Eliza Touchet's story and then would be jerked away to the trial of The Claimant, a man who claimed to be Robert Tichborne, heir to the Tichborne estate. Touchet is the narrator of the book, both of the author salons she was witness to and the trial. I often wondered what she felt was the more important story! I did love Eliza's character and Zadie did a marvelous job of voicing her. UPDATE: I just discovered this July, 2023, New Yorker article in which Smith describes her reasons for the book and her process of writing it over several years. Delightful and something I wish I had read before reading the book.