Fraud

Zadie Smith returns to the literary scene with her first historical novel. The year is 1873. Mrs Eliza Touchet is the Scottish housekeeper—and cousin by marriage—to the once-famous, now-declining novelist William Ainsworth, with whom she has lived for thirty years. Mrs Touchet is a woman of many interests: her hobbies include literature, justice, abolitionism, and the afterlife. However, she is also a sceptic. She suspects her cousin of having no talent, his successful friend, Mr Charles Dickens, of being a tyrant and a moralist—and ultimately, England of being a country of façades, where nothing is as it seems. The author brilliantly blends historical events with fiction in this story that stretches between Jamaica and Britain.