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.” Zadie Smith is clever enough to make anything sound plausible, but the most outrageous elements of her new novel, “The Fraud,” are actually true.

Even though the last one is about Ainsworths, it reminded me of reading David Copperfield and Shirley. In a year when I’ve had the privilege of reading many memorable books, this one stands out. So many layers, so many themes, so many memorable characters, all presented in a distinctive, insightful voice.Throughout the "Fraud" plays on multiple levels. The Claimant is the obvious fraud. So is some of Ainsworth's writing. And so is Touchet in some ways. Employing nimble dialogue and sly humor, Smith moves The Fraud along swiftly and mysteriously, challenging you to keep up with competing plot lines. One of these concerns the Tichborne affair — the wild, real-life court case in which a gruff butcher claimed to be a long lost nobleman and heir to a sizable fortune. Smith’s retelling of this “trial of the century” alone is worth the price of admission for The Fraud, though I could have spent an entire novel in the company of prosaic novelist William Ainsworth and Eliza Touchet, his witty abolitionist housekeeper, muse, lover, and, of course, cousin.”— The Philadelphia Inquirer She had always noticed a great many Chinese and Indian seamen in this area and they were all still here, but there were also several newer shops with their signs written in the ancient script of the Jews, and a small delegation of Turks - or at least men in fez hats - peering into the windows of a jeweller. 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.

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. Smartly rendered, true to its own time while also deeply reflective of ours, it’s a terrific novel, perhaps Smith’s finest . . . The Fraud is a novel of sublime empathy, in which the author’s voice and perspective bestow a contemporary edge. From the Claimant and his supporters to Ainsworth and Mrs. Touchet, Smith understands how much we need one another, and the consolations of narrative, true and false.” — 4Columns Sorry this is so long, but it’s either “This is a great book!” - or the full version that follows. :-) It is 1873. Mrs. Eliza Touchet is the Scottish housekeeper—and cousin by marriage—of a once-famous novelist, now in decline, William Ainsworth, with whom she has lived for thirty years. 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

Retailers:

Maybe 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. An English author with a tin ear and an involute sexual past pens a ‘Jamaican novel’ as a newsy trial unfurls, a once-enslaved man the key witness, in Zadie Smith’s Victorian historical novel par excellence.”— Vanity Fair, “The Best New Books, From Novels to Memoirs”

The humiliations of girlhood. The separating of the beautiful from the plain and the ugly. The terror of maidenhood. The trials of marriage or childbirth – or their absence. The loss of that same beauty around which the whole system appears to revolve. The change of life. What strange lives women lead!” la storia della vita di Andrew Bogle, un ex schiavo che fu uno dei testimoni del processo Tichborne.

More often, though, the book’s structure is uneven. One wishes, for instance, that the chapters would signal their time jumps more consistently, so that one wasn’t wondering if one was with the Eliza of the 1830s or the 1870s. But these infelicities stop mattering when we are deep into the trial and the book turns into a portrait of people with thwarted ambitions, of people who, like Ainsworth, become frauds without knowing it. Zadie Smith has done what she never wished to do: shewrote a historical novel. Thankfully for her, and for us, she managed to take this form and spin it into something entirely new, a feat only Smith could undertake . . . It’s an extremely smart and involved novel that asks all the right questions about morality and nuance. I would describe The Fraud as I would describe life: it’s complicated, deep, ridiculous, scary, and funny. It took a genius to write it, and cements Zadie Smith as the British novelist of our time.”— Julia Hass, Literary Hub 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.