"If anybody truly understood what is signified by the word 'person', they would consider twelve lifetimes too brief a spell in which to love a single soul."

Oh boy, did I struggle with this historical fiction book by an author I usually love. The plot is loosely based on the life of a nineteenth-century author - Willian Ainsworth, a contemporary of Charles Dickens (one of Ainsworth's novels outsold 'Oliver Twist'). The story is told largely from the viewpoint of William's cousin by marriage, Eliza Touchet – he takes her in after his cousin abandons her for another woman. A complicated relationship forms between William, Eliza and William's wife Frances.

The storyline primarily concerns people's interest, including Eliza's, is the story of a man who is fraudulently claiming to be a very rich man who was lost at sea. 'Sir Roger Tichborne' is taken to court for falsely trying to claim the dead man's estate. The kicker is that it seems most of England's poor support the defendant. Massive rallies are held, fundraising campaigns launched, and Mrs Touchet reluctantly becomes fascinated by this dog and pony show, particularly with the Jamaican servant who is testifying in 'The Fraud's' favour, Mr Bogle.

In the black man, Eliza sees someone dignified, honest and down-to-earth. She attempts to make friends with him, though he doesn't seem keen to reciprocate. He tells her his life story, and she makes an effort to write it down, pretending to be a journalist.

'The Fraud' explores many things and has multiple sub-plots, some of which seemed not to really go anywhere, and to be frank, it felt like a real slog to get through. I enjoy historical fiction – and Dickens is a favourite – but I just could not get into this one and it took me about two weeks to finish. It felt way too long, like I would never reach the end and that's not how you should feel about a book.

What I did find interesting was the interplay between Mrs Touchet's various relationships, particularly her problematic interest in Bogle, who becomes almost a kind of 'noble savage' type character to her, despite her fight for emancipation.

I loved 'On Beauty' and 'White Teeth', and unfortunately, this just is not the author's best work.

The Fraud tells the story of William Ainsworth, a novelist in the 19th century, who holds company with the likes of Charles Dickens. His recently widowed cousin, Eliza, becomes his housekeeper, while also developing her own interests around abolitionism, literature and class. The book consists of three main storylines, spanning the 19th century: Eliza and William’s life; the trial into a case of potential identity fraud; and the life of a once-enslaved man after he becomes a witness in the trial.

Zadie Smith is a brilliant writer, and this book is very well-written. I enjoyed the stories of Jamaican plantations set against classism in the UK, with characters unable to make the connections between the two. This is specifically evident in the case of Eliza, who, despite her passion for abolition and justice, is confronted with her own classism/racism throughout. However, while there were some very interesting themes, I found the interlocking storylines quite confusing, and felt that none were well-concluded. I found that more time was spent discussion William’s literary friends than delving into the relationship between the cousins which would’ve been much more interesting. Also, the trial itself did not excite me, and the constant changing timeline didn’t seem to serve the purpose of the book. While it is obvious that some brilliant research has been done here, I feel that unnecessary details or scenes were included to simply show off the research rather than develop the book.

Enjoyed this book: intricate historical fiction with many characters and intertwined narratives. Seems to be quite close to historical accuracy, though the woman who supports the prolific if critically unloved novelist throughout is the main character, rather than the novelist himself. The story also connects with broader themes of racism, imperialism, and the self-serving moral climate of the established and privileged. Smith handles this delicately and is all the more powerful for it!

Thanks to Penguin and Net Galley for an advance copy!

THE FRAUD is Zadie Smith at her best, weaving together - quite complicated - narratives with an ease that makes for a really brilliant reading experience. Would recommend.

The Tichborne trial is the centre of all news in England. Is the claimant truly the heir to a fortune or is he a fraud? Housekeeper Eliza Touchet is, like most of the country, hooked on the case. Eliza has many interests and her job in the household of a writer enables her to spend time on discourse but as the trial goes on she starts to question the politics around her.
I had heard of the Tichborne Claimant and this is the case central to this novel. However Smith uses it to explore the way that abolitionism spread through the country. I liked this diversion into historical fiction as Smith generally has a very modern tone to her work.

Intelligent, provocative and highly readable, Zadie Smith has created a brilliant historical novel that manages to combine three stories in one and examine the society then and now via an examination of truth and freedom.

I love Zadie Smith and I enjoy historical fiction so I was really excited when I heard she was publishing in this genre. But unfortunately for me, this is my least favourite of the Smith I have read. To begin with, I was really enjoying it. Smith is very good at writing in that wry, dry humour tone that I recognise from Victorian novels, she is witty and knows how to write a sentence, and I always feel propelled along in her books. She also draws characters so well, and this book is no exception, with our central cast drawn out so as to be wonderfully flawed and fully realised. I think my problem with this book was that it didn't feel sure quite what it wanted to be. We have a part that follows the cousin of a down-on-his-luck writer and explores the literary scene at the time, with clever satire of famous writers, wonderful humour and the best character in the book. Then we have a fictional representation of a real trial for fraud as a man tries to claim an inheritance that many believe is not his. This bit was the most boring and long of the book, it fell into the trap that can sometimes plague historical fiction writers of too much research spilt onto the page, this is your little wormhole as a writer and you need to cut cut cut to make it enjoyable as a reader. Then we have a section in Jamaica, following a formerly enslaved man and the effect of the ending of the trade on his life, the rebellions in Jamaica and his travelling to London. This part was again really interesting and well written, heartbreaking really, but it lasted 70 pages and was connected in a tenuous way. Zadie Smith is a great writer, but this felt lacking in polish, and frankly a little bit boring.

Undeniably funny I loved the observations and quips of Mrs Touchet. I was fascinated by the historical setting and appearance of literary figures throughout and found this to be unique in its dealings with the past.

The meditations on truth and self-deception gave plenty of food for thought and there was immense depth beneath the light-hearted moments.

A victoriana novel to rival Dickens in the way only Zadie Smith can.

Unfortunately, this book didn't work for me. I enjoyed it when it was focused on Eliza and found her voice honest and authentic. However, the plot structure and pacing were really disorientating and made me fail to really engage with any of the storylines. I found Eliza's relationships too opaque and I couldn't really understand what her motivations were. The trial - whilst the writing was always good, I just wasn't invested and kept realising while I was reading it that I didn't really care. And the literary figures were amusing, but too anecdotal to pull me along. Because of the super short chapters this just all felt too disjointed and disconnected and I struggled.
This honest review is given with thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for this book.

Baffling, brilliant, frustrating, and very funny, Zadie Smith's latest novel, The Fraud, is extremely difficult to review or rate. Personally, I was hugely impressed by this book but I didn't enjoy the experience of reading it. At the centre of The Fraud is Eliza Touchet, a character who is both real and imaginary - Mrs Touchet actually lived but died much earlier than Smith wants her to. And Mrs Touchet is the hook that pulls the reader through this patchwork of a novel, which moves across decades and countries, taking in the Tichborne trial of the 1860s and 1870s, the lives of enslaved people in Jamaica in the 1830s and 1840s, as well as long digressions on the literary scene of early Victorian Britain, the Great Exhibition (you get the sense Smith couldn't resist), 'Ethiope singers' at the Metropolitan Tabernacle and the pointlessness of churning out novels. We also get a delightfully nasty portrait of Dickens, with which I am of course fully in favour.

The Fraud is a novel (at least partly) about race, colonialism and slavery that tries to look at the realities of imperial Britain through the blinkered eyes of its white inhabitants. Even the brief section that deals with the life-story of 'black Bogle', who serves as a key witness in the Tichborne trial, is implicitly filtered through Mrs Touchet. Smith employs the tactics and tics of nineteenth-century novelists, masterfully inhabiting the mindset of literary Victorians, but also exposes their worlds as incomplete, showing how the empire understitches everything in this confident England. Occasionally, The Fraud reminded me of Valerie Martin's Property, which is set in the 1820s and narrated by the wife of a Louisiana slaveowner, Manon. Like Manon, Mrs Touchet can be acutely attentive to the oppression of women and less so to the nuances of the oppression of formerly enslaved black people - although, unlike Manon, she did at least support the abolition of the slave trade. And while Manon dehumanises the enslaved black woman, Sarah, whom we see only through her eyes, Mrs Touchet gives us an idealised portrait of Andrew Bogle that in its way, makes him just as much of a cipher. She gets in the way of us understanding his true humanity.

Nevertheless, Smith has more to say about Mrs Touchet than that she's a bit blind to issues of race. Her ambitions are George Eliot in scope, interrogating Mrs Touchet as a wholly sympathetic, flawed, contradictory person, and she extends the same complexities to the other white characters in the cast (Mrs Touchet's cousin William may be a hopelessly self-absorbed novelist, but he can also be clever and endearing; William's working-class wife Sarah seems like a total idiot at first but catches onto things Mrs Touchet doesn't). Smith also has no interest in letting the reader comfortably condemn Mrs Touchet. Instead, she makes us ask what we are blind to when we think we are safely on the right side of history. Is Mrs Touchet the 'fraud' of this novel, alongside William and the false Tichborne - or are we all frauds? There are a few bits that didn't work for me - Mrs Touchet's bisexuality felt a bit tacked on, especially the obligatory references to the Ladies of Llangollen - but on the whole, Smith succeeds magnificently.

Having written all this I'm now wondering myself why I haven't rated this novel higher. I think, in short: it takes SUCH a long time to come together. I only began to discern Smith's real purposes in the final quarter, which made everything up until then feel so directionless. It was just a bit of a slog for me and so I don't think I can bump it up any more. However, it gave me so much to think with that I am glad I did read it. 3.5 stars.

This is the story of two complicated, enigmatic figures whose lives intersect over a court case. As always the standard of the writing was excellent, but it seemed that the parts set in Jamaica were more vivid than the parts set in London.

Zadie Smith described it as a "contemporary novel about Victorian people" and she doesn't try to make it a Victorian novel stylistically.
Mrs Eliza Touchet has a somewhat elusive quality. She is constricted by her gender from truly engaging in the life she might want.
Andrew Bogle is constricted by his race from the life HE might want to lead.
Just as in the (real life) Tichborne Trial the jury has to reach a verdict, we are being presented with facts to make our own judgements.

Some of the debates for me were too longwinded without Dickens' trademark eye for comic detail. Am ambitious book, well written but not my favourite Zadie Smith.

Well, that was….fine. 😬 Yes, it‘s clearly well researched and there is some wit in there, particularly from one of the MCs but, bearing in mind that there are 3 different storylines, nothing much actually happens.

I don‘t think that the 3 storylines mesh well together, even though they are clearly linked, and I never felt involved with any of the characters.

Still a (light) pick, but felt a bit of a chore in places.

I’m a bit half-hearted about this long, sprawling historical novel. It’s well-written, well-researched and overall interesting. But I didn’t feel that the three strands of the narrative meshed together effectively and there were longueurs that slowed everything down so that it all dragged on occasion. Set in Victorian England and Jamaica it’s a tale of slavery, sex and scandal. It centres around William Harrison Ainsworth, a now largely forgotten Victorian novelist who in his day was every bit as famous as Dickens. Eliza Touchet, his housekeeper. cousin and one-time lover is the hinge on which everything hangs. The other two threads are the story of the Tichborne Claimant and his trial of 1971, and the life of Andrew Bogle, a black slave who becomes the Tichborne Claimant’s manservant. It’s all richly imagined and depicted, and feels authentic, but the trial itself is too detailed and too long and I never warmed to Bogle himself. The most interesting part for me was the Ainsworth narrative, which I found compelling, but the other sections not so much.

My thanks to Penguin Group U.K. Hamish Hamilton for an eARC via NetGalley of ‘The Fraud’ by Zadie Smith. I complemented my reading with its unabridged audiobook edition, read by the author.

This is Smith’s first foray into historical fiction and while a shift from her usual contemporary settings continues her legacy of exploring social issues via an ensemble cast of interconnected people.

‘The Fraud’ is set in Britain and Jamaica during the nineteenth century. It has been described by many as Dickensian. I would agree though felt that it was somewhat lighter, more of a ‘comedy of manners’, though one still addressing serious issues. As a complex work of literary fiction, I found that it required a close reading.

‘The Fraud’ is based on real events and is populated by literary figures of the period, though obviously Smith exercised artistic license, which she notes in her Afterword. It’s also quite hard to summarise, though shall attempt to for context.

The focal point of the novel is the infamous 'Tichborne Trial' that in 1873 had gripped the nation. There is much controversy as to whether the defendant is Roger Tichborne, the missing heir to the Tichborne Baronetcy, as he claims or an imposter.

In Kilburn, London Mrs Eliza Touchet, a Scottish widow, is captivated by the trial. Eliza is an intelligent woman with many interests including literature, the abolitionism movement, women’s rights, and class issues. 

Mrs Touchet is also the cousin by marriage to the novelist William Harrison Ainsworth, who had been very successful in the early Victorian period. Among his circle are literary figures including Charles Dickens and William Makepeace Thackery. However, by 1873 Ainsworth’s career is in decline.

Another key character is Andrew Bogle, who had grown up enslaved on the Hope Plantation in Jamaica. He had later worked as a servant for the Tichborne family and had known Roger Tichborne well. As a result, he is a star witness for the Tichborne Trial.

The novel is divided into eight volumes, each with short chapters and moves fluidly about in time. These shifts are indicated in the chapter titles. In the tradition of Victorian novels the chapter titles are quite descriptive. So aside from events in 1873-4, we have glimpses of characters experiencing the Great Exhibition of 1851 and outings in the 1830s. Obviously, the abolitionist movement is featured throughout with the contemporary debates about Britain’s historic involvement and continuing responsibilities.

Zadie Smith’s writing is beautiful and quite lyrical. I found reading it an immersive experience, though on occasion I was taking breaks to look up various things, including the satirical cartoons of the day mentioned in the text.

Throughout Smith also explores the often fluid relationship between fiction and fact. At one point Eliza muses how over time some fictional events portrayed in her cousin’s historical novels are now perceived as true. “Eliza attributed this not to any special skill on her cousin’s part but to the fact that 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.” Still very true today.

Overall, I found ‘The Fraud’ an amazing novel: witty, intelligent, multilayered, and thought provoking. I feel that I have only touched its surface on this initial read and so hope to reread. I expect to see it nominated for literary awards in 2024. It may also appeal to reading groups seeking an accessible work of literary fiction.

Highly recommended.

The Fraud is a historical novel that centers around the lives of several people who really existed, about whom we have varying degrees of documented historical information. Most prominent is William Harrison Ainsworth, a prolific novelist who was quite successful in his time but whose works are largely forgotten today. The novel is mainly focalised through the eyes of Ainsworth’s Scottish housekeeper, Eliza Touchet, who also really existed but whom Smith can more freely flesh out thanks to the little that is really known about her life. The novel’s main plotted action concerns the infamous affair of ‘The Tichborne Claimant,’ which captivated much of England in the mid-Victorian era. Roger Tichborne was a presumed-dead heir to the Tichborne fortune, having disappeared after a shipwreck in 1854. In the late 1860’s the Tichborne Claimant, a man who was likely a butcher named Arthur Orton, came forward claiming to be Roger Tichborne himself. Despite the fact that he bore no resemblance to the man he purported to be, the Claimant built a wide base of supporters, and found himself at the center of a populist furore, holding rallies and raising funds for his suit from the working classes. Though he ultimately lost in both civil and criminal trials and went to prison for perjury, the effects of this collective response continued to reverberate for some years after.

I provide this summary because Smith’s novel is strongest in its interrogation of the power of collective social fascination and explosions of populist feeling. All historical novels are, of course, as much about the time in which they are published as the time they presume to narrate, and as such, it is impossible to read The Fraud without associating this narrative of populist contradictions with our modern day demagogues and strongmen - in particular, that ever-present poison whose name, like the book’s titular figure, Tichborne, also begins with T.

The novel dramatizes how the right sort of story surrounding the right sort of figure at the right moment can capture a crowd, and a varied one at that, attracting individuals to a charismatic cipher who fills whatever void they are carrying around inside themselves. When protagonist Mrs. Touchet attends a talk given by the Tichborne claimant, she notes the diversity of the crowd that surrounds her:

“There were as many men as women. As many with dirty hands as clean. She saw farmers and hod-carriers and men with faces black with soot, holding their caps to their chests. She saw women for whom she knew no respectable name. Yet here, too, filing under the red-brick arch, were clerks and schoolteachers, dissenters of all stripes, shopkeepers and foremen, ladies’ maids, cooks, governesses.

‘Justice for Sir Roger!’ cried a perfectly sane-looking girl, and thrust a pamphlet into Eliza’s hand…”

The novel is most interesting when it is exploring this cognitive dissonance, the absurdity of a vast swathe of people, particularly oppressed people, defending the right of either 1) a fraudster to inherent a fortune he isn’t entitled to, or 2) an already extremely wealthy man getting access to more wealth than they could ever hope to see. The Claimant, with his rough manners and accent, his bullish attitude, and his absolute lack of the breeding that would clearly be present if he actually were ‘Sir Roger,’ is exactly what endears him to the crowd. He wears his coarseness on the body and speaks it aloud, and thousands upon thousands of people vehemently cheer for him as someone who has been done wrong.

Sound familiar?

Beyond the story of the Claimant, we garner ths history of Eliza Touchet and the novelist Ainsworth though various flashbacks, and we follow her friendship with the formerly enslaved Claimant supporter, Andrew Bogle (also a genuine historical figure). Smith’s writing, as ever, is gorgeous; the pieces are all here in this work, and so I wonder why it ultimately left me a bit cold. Mrs. Touchet is a fantastic protagonist, who sits at the center of various narratives, many of which one might suspect could be the basis of an entire book themselves. There are long-lost illegitimate children, questions of inheritance and freedom, racy sexual histories, the fight to abolish slavery, a secretly written book… yet all of these threads are only loosely touched upon, more there as subtextual facets to her character rather than elements of her plot. As a result the novel itself meanders, drifting through long digressions and extremely short anecdotes, leaving the reader to wonder what story it is really telling while also encouraging her to tease a meaning out of the pieces. It’s Dickensian until it isn’t. And I can’t quite decide if this is brilliant or unsatisfying, but I suspect is it a little bit of both.

3.5 stars rounded down for goodreads!

It is no question, at this point, that Zadie Smith is immensely talented. She must be, because she’s made me read, and enjoy, a historical fiction- something I never thought would happen.

The Fraud transports you back to Victorian London for the Tichborne trial, but that is not the star of the show here. The novel itself starts off centred around Eliza Touchet, a widowed housekeeper, and moves onto the story of Andrew Bogle, star witness of the Tichborne trial. I won’t delve too much into the plot, as it’s more of an entangled web of history and real-life events.

The first thing I have to say about this novel is that the level of research shown here is incredible. It’s very clear that a huge amount of work went into the creation of this book and it really paid off. The tone, language, and style felt authentically historical and the execution was very well done.

The kaleidoscopic storytelling is reminiscent of Smith’s first novel, White Teeth, but this time it leaves the reader to work a little harder to figure out the context. This style did leave me slightly confused (having to go back and check which one of Ainsworth’s rich white friends they were talking about this time). However, I think this says more about my inability to retain information than about Smith’s writing.

As I just mentioned, there were confusing aspects of the text which brought me out of the story slightly, and not all information felt entirely necessary. That being said, I enjoyed reading all of Bogle’s backstory and probably could’ve read more.

Overall, I thought this was a well-researched, well-written and interesting story, but hasn’t quite converted me onto historical fiction.

Vividly told historical fiction based on the Tichborne Trial - where a lower class butcher from Australia claimed he was the rightful heir of a large estate and it’s title.
He claimed he was lost at sea and the important element to the case was the key witness, a black manservant, Andrew Bogle.
The story is told in short witty chapters.
It’s a case that divided Victorian England and would make a perfect TV adaptation.
Told by the point of view of Eliza Touchet, a Scottish housekeeper to her cousin, William Ainsworth. She has become enthralled by the Tichborne case.
Loved the theme of freedom, that every person has the right to be free, and that fraud could be applied to many of the characters in the book, not just the fraudster in the case on trial - they are deluded and lying to themselves.
A throughly enjoyable read - witty and funny throughout.
Thanks @zadiesmith @penguinuk & @netgalley for the eARC

I wanted to like this novel, I really did. But I found it hard going.

As always, Smith writes tremendously well and brings an historical era to life in a new and vibrant way. She displays this strength particularly through dialogue and also shows the casual violence of the times with fleeting references that make you question what you’ve just read forcing you to go back and check that your eyes haven’t played a trick on you.

However, I had an issue and that was with the substantial section of the novel, just over halfway through when Bogle’s life story was explained. This is not to say that it isn’t well written, arguably it is the most powerful part of the novel given its subject matter, but as a reader it almost felt that the that story that you had been following up to this point had been abandoned and felt like a “brain dump” of information. I couldn’t work out the reasoning behind why Bogle’s tale wasn’t “cut” with the rest of the narrative, it felt like a massive handbrake turn.

I was left feeling that I needed to read the novel again. May be that’s a good thing but I’m not sure that that would have been Smith’s desired outcome.

The Tichborne court case was one which fascinated all levels of society in mid nineteenth century Britain. It concerned a claim from an heir, believed dead, who returned from Australia to take up his inheritance, despite looking nothing like the man he claimed to be. The upper echelons of society were largely outraged by the impudence of this rascal, but below that there was much popular support from those who saw it as a challenge to established attitudes and practices and it is this case which is at the centre of Zadie Smith’s latest ambitious novel, steeped in fact and research.
The case is seen largely through the eyes of the household of author W. E Ainsworth (1805-82). His interest in it is cursory, he is single-mindedly churning out over-ripe historical novels (his “Jack Shepherd” actually outsold “Oliver Twist”) amidst his on-going rivalries to contemporaries Dickens and Thackeray and struggles with his celebrated illustrator George Cruickshank. His cousin and main character Eliza Touchet and his young wife bond over the case. Sarah believes even the most outlandish aspects and Eliza becomes obsessed with the claimant’s strongest supporter, a black elderly man named Bogle (nicknamed Black Bogle by the press) who recognised Tichborne from his past and who also captivates the public’s imagination by his loyalty and trustworthiness.
However, there’s a lot more going on in this novel than this. Britain is attempting to emerge from the Slave Trade with head held high. There are embargos on cotton and some in society are shunning sugar in an attempt to ease consciences. The character of Andrew Bogle takes us to Jamaica and illustrate what the British interests there really mean. Hypocrisy and fraudulent behaviour is rife everywhere.
There are going to be a lot of comparisons to Dickens and the author does get the feel, with a modern perspective. She employs a little trick Dickens uses in sidestepping the main narrative and digressing with something that will be picked up later on. When reading Dickens the reader becomes aware that they might not know what is going on at times, this is also the case here.
There’s a lot of complex issues here and I think certainly the Jamaican aspects could have been expanded. There’s a fascinating relationship with Eliza, Ainsworth and his first wife which I would have liked to have seen developed. It’s very readable, pacy, the chapters are (too?) short and it moves around in terms of time and locations but I think I would have liked the author to have taken more time to create scenes which will fix this book in my mind. It skirts around a lot of characters, issues and events leaving the impression of breadth and scope but this is imbalanced with being really drawn into the narrative. I was very impressed but I felt I was just being kept somewhat at arm’s length and this is to do with the episodic structure.
On paper this looked like it could have been one of my Books Of The Year, as it ticked so many things I really enjoy about my fiction but on completion I don’t think it is and I’m not absolutely sure why.
The Fraud is published in hardback by Hamish Hamilton on 7th September 2023. Many thanks to the publishers and Netgalley for the advance review copy.

The Fraud is well-researched historical fiction set in Victorian England, based on the lives of several real people.

We follow Eliza Touchet, the cousin and housekeeper for the novelist William Harrison Ainsworth, as well as the famous trial of the Tichborne claimant where an Australian butcher claimed to be the long-lost heir to a title and fortune. There's also the story of Andrew Bogle, a former Jamaican slave who's the star witness in the Tichborne trial.

There are actually many "frauds" in the book, with people making fraudulent claims about themselves as well as the wider societal frauds perpetuated by colonialism, racism and sexism. I noticed an interesting parallel to recent politics where the fraudulent "Sir Roger Tichborne" gets a huge popular following as a man of the people and raising lots of money for his defence, despite being an obvious liar. That was interesting from a psychological viewpoint.

In summary: a very interesting book which I thoroughly enjoyed.