The Fraud

Zadie Smith

See the full ranking

The Fraud was named Book of the Year 2023 by the New York Times, New Yorker, Guardian, Economist, Observer, The Spectator, Financial Times, Vogue, The Times, The Oldie, i Paper, The Standard, Washington Post, Independent, and Daily Express, was shortlisted for the Waterstones Book of the Year 2023 and the Writers' Prize for Fiction 2024, and was longlisted for the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction 2024. Truth and fiction. Jamaica and Britain. Who gets to tell their story? In her first historical novel, Zadie Smith transports the reader to a Victorian England transfixed by the real-life trial of the Tichborne Claimant, in which a cockney butcher, recently returned from Australia, lays claim to the Tichborne baronetcy, with his former slave Andrew Bogle as star witness. Watching the proceedings, and with her own story to tell, is Eliza Touchet – cousin, housekeeper and perhaps more – to failing novelist William Harrison Ainsworth. From literary London to the Jamaica's sugar-cane plantations, Zadie Smith weaves an enthralling story linking the rich and the poor, the free and the enslaved, and the comic and the tragic.