The Fraud
A Novel
AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
From acclaimed and bestselling novelist Zadie Smith, a sprawling work of historical fiction set against the legal trial that divided Victorian England, about who gets to tell their story—and who gets to be believed.
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. Mrs. Touchet is a woman of many interests: literature, justice, abolitionism, class, her cousin, his wives, this life, and the next. But she is also sceptical. She suspects her cousin of having no talent; his successful friend, Mr. Charles Dickens, of being a bully and a moralist; and England of being a…