Emma recommends... The Fraud - Zadie Smith | EXCLUSIVE EDITION

Emma recommends... Fiercely intelligent, Dickensian in scope, and massively thought-provoking. Smith has always been a talent but there is something even more astounding in this book, her historical fiction debut. A substantial and serious book, it is also lively (and funny!), with short chapters transporting you seamlessly between times and places, interweaving narratives and creatively stitching together fiction with real people and events.

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Truth and fiction. Jamaica and Britain. Who gets to tell their story?

Zadie Smith returns with her first historical novel.

Kilburn, 1873. The 'Tichborne Trial' has captivated the widowed Scottish housekeeper Mrs Eliza Touchet and all of England. Readers are at odds over whether the defendant is who he claims to be - or an imposter.

Mrs Touchet is a woman of many interests: literature, justice, abolitionism, class, her novelist cousin and his wives, this life and the next. But she is also sceptical. She suspects England of being a land of facades, in which nothing is quite what it seems.

Andrew Bogle meanwhile finds himself the star witness, his future depending on telling the right story. Growing up enslaved on the Hope Plantation, Jamaica, he knows every lump of sugar comes at a human cost. That the rich deceive the poor. And that people are more easily manipulated than they realise.

Based on real historical events, The Fraud is a dazzling novel about how in a world of hypocrisy and self-deception, deciding what's true can prove a complicated task.

Indie bookshop exclusive edition with an orange sprayed edge!