The New York Times bestseller bull One of the New York Times 10 Best Books of the Year bull One of Npr's Best Books of the Year bull Named a Best Book of the Year by Publishers Weekly and Book Page bull One of Oprah Daily's Best Novels of 2023 A brilliant new entry in Smith catalog The Fraud is not a change for Smith, but a demonstration of how expansive her talents are. Los Angeles Times From acclaimed and bestselling novelist Zadie Smith, a kaleidoscopic 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 skeptical. 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. That the rich deceive the poor. …