The Fraud Zadie Smith
The Fraud is an impressive historical novel about populism and slavery.
Zadie Smiths novel is based on a celebrated 19th-century criminal trial – the Trichborne case. Sir Roger Tichborne, British inheritor of a great title and fortune disappeared at sea on his way to Jamaica in 1854, but ten years later a man claims to be Trichborne…
The novel is largely told from the perspective of Eliza Touchet, cousin and housekeeper of the British writer William Harrison Ainsworth. In short chapters, we follow the events in the writer’s household, narratives of Victorian intellectual frenzies and political debates. Eliza Touchet narrative of the Trichborne case sheds light on racism, mass mobilization, the strength of the media and the seductive power of lies.
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