The Fraud: The Instant Sunday Times Bestseller

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My favorite of Smith’s work . . . The Fraud is a deeply researched historical novel, a first for Smith and one that she resisted mightily, but the characters are vividly rendered and distressingly familiar . . . Smith has once again proved that she’s a writer willing to challenge herself as she navigates complicated character dynamics and the heavy weight of history—all with a keen sense of humor.” —Shondaland

Rapture. Beauty. Grace translated - made visible. Had she ever truly heard music until this moment?

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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.

This book offers so much to admire and enjoy. For starters, there's the wonderful voice of Eliza Touchet, the main narrator -- the widowed cousin of the middle-rate Victorian novelist William Ainsworth --whose smart insights into human nature are told with just enough of an old-fashioned speech pattern to make her perspective clearly not modern, without being "prithee" quaint. As well, the book brilliantly spans 40 years of social changes, as Eliza slowly grows more conscious of racism, class prejudice, and the devastating impact of industrial capitalism. I also loved the interweaving of time shifts (though I know that not all readers like that technique). 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. With the virtuosic agility of an actor in a one-woman play, Smith as narrator so fully embodies each of her many distinct characters that she exposes, sometimes without their even knowing, the ways in which every one of us misrepresents ourselves in one way or another. This is a 19th-century novel of manners in which various people have very bad ones, and the result, thanks to the author’s perfect ear for comic timing, is vigorously, insistently funny…Smith bounces nimbly across the vernacular empire while leaving no mistake about her ubiquitous irony, her vocal side eye.”— Lauren Christensen, The New York Times Book ReviewZadie Smith is a gifted storyteller and prose stylist. And The Fraud makes a compelling case that historical fiction can lie to tell the truth.” — Pittsburgh Post-Gazette