The Fraud: The Instant Sunday Times Bestseller

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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 did have a little skip ahead and it looks like a vaguely more interesting storyline is introduced, but I've just got nothing left to give at this point. 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.

Almost all the less-famous characters, including Eliza and William, are also based on real people.) has been a remarkable year for literature for many reasons, including the long-awaited return of Zadie Smith… Based on real historical events, The Fraud is a captivating look into the fraudulent and the authentic.”— Chicago Review of Books Sorry this is so long, but it’s either “This is a great book!” - or the full version that follows. :-) the great majority of people turn out to be extraordinarily suggestible, with brains like sieves through which the truth falls. Fact and fiction meld in their minds.” The Fraud, [Smith’s] sixth novel, is partly about an enslaved man on a Jamaican sugar plantation, and it’s a comedy: those two things at once. Few would dare; fewer could pull it off as Smith does here, mixing narrative delight with a vein of rapid, skimming satire as she sketches scenes of life in 19th-century England and the Caribbean . . . In all this multiplicity, different models of Victorian fiction are inherited and transformed . . . The Fraud is a curious combination of gloriously light, deft writing and strenuous construction . . . It slows and expands lavishly in honour of its Victorian subjects, yet its chapters are elliptical half-scenes chosen with modernist economy. Happily its eight ‘volumes’ can be bound with one spine. Here is historical fiction with all the day-lit attentiveness that Eliza hopes for: ‘stories of human beings, struggling, suffering, deluding others and themselves, being cruel to each other and kind. Usually both.’ Generous and undogmatic as ever, Smith makes room for ‘both’.”— Alexandra Harris, The GuardianBased on real historical events, The Fraud is a dazzling novel about truth and fiction, Jamaica and Britain, fraudulence and authenticity and the mystery of “other people.”

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. Pithy, richly detailed. . . Smith’s sixth novel explores themes of race, class, power and loss. . . in many ways, The Fraud has much in common with Smith’s contemporary novels in its deft portrayal of metropolitan society and the entangled lives within. . . as this novel shows, there is no better guide to people and their bottomlessness than Smith herself.”— The i There are multiple parts to the story. It worked best when Smith concentrated on Eliza Touchet, the cousin by marriage of William Ainsworth. Through her eyes, we get to see the “Tichborne trial” when Roger Castro, an Australian butcher attempts to prove he is the true Lord Roger Tichborne. Andrew Bogle is a former Jamaican slave who swears that the claimant is truly Lord Tichborne. There’s a whole section devoted to his past and while I get why Smith wrote it, it also took me out of the primary story.

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I will admit to struggling with The Fraud. There are flashes of brilliance and humor, especially when Smith is writing about Ainsworth and his prolific, but bad writing, but at times she seems to fall victim to the same things she’s making fun of. The book meanders and I felt like Smith was trying to cram way too much into the story. It is hard indeed to judge a respectable woman on her source of income, Mr Cruikshank, when so very few means of procuring an income are open to her.’ In addition to the whole idea of “what is truth” is the idea of freedom. Not just the slaves, but women of the day. Eliza is invisible due to her sex and her age. She’s smarter than William, but she’s constrained by her sex. I did like what it had to say about who is a fraud. Not just Castro, but also Ainsworth and even Eliza herself. But no story captured her quite like the saga of the Tichborne Claimant. It had everything: toffs, Catholics, money, sex, mistaken identity, an inheritance, High Court Judges, snobbery, exotic locations, ‘the struggle of the honest working man’ – as opposed to the ‘undeserving poor’ – and ‘the power of a mother’s love’.”