The fraud : a novel / Zadie Smith.
Material type: TextPublisher: [Toronto] : Hamish Hamilton, 2023Description: 454 pages ; 25 cmContent type:- text
- unmediated
- volume
- 9780735235441 (hardcover)
- [Fic] 23
Item type | Current library | Collection | Call number | Status | Date due | Barcode | Item holds | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
BOOK | Meaford Public Library Fiction | Fiction | FIC Smith (Browse shelf(Opens below)) | Available | 23935 |
From novelist Zadie Smith, a kaleidoscopic work of historical fiction set against the legal trial that divided Victorian England, about who deserves to tell their story-and about who deserves 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 land of facades, in which nothing is quite what it seems. Andrew Bogle meanwhile grew up enslaved on the Hope Plantation, Jamaica. He knows every lump of sugar comes at a human cost. He knows that the rich deceive the poor. And that people are more easily manipulated than they realize. When Bogle finds himself in London, star witness in a celebrated case of imposture, he knows his future depends on telling the right story. The "Tichborne Trial"-wherein a lower-class butcher from Australia claimed he was in fact the rightful heir of a sizable estate and title-captivates Mrs. Touchet and all of England. Is Sir Roger Tichborne really who he says he is? Or is he a fraud? Mrs. Touchet is a woman of the world. Mr. Bogle is no fool. But in a world of hypocrisy and self-deception, deciding what is real proves a complicated task. Based on real historical events, The Fraud is a dazzling novel about truth and fiction, Jamaica and Britain, fraudulence and authenticity, and the mystery of "other people."
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