The Fraud

A bit of a curveball entry, but go with it. One of the subplots in Smith’s impressively sprawling historical novel involves do-gooder Baptists who really are doing good! They’re in Anglican England to agitate for the end of slavery in the British colonies—and they’re ahead of their time in other ways, too.

They help to platform the voices of freedmen and escaped slaves, acting as allies, essentially. It’s in the main character of Eliza that the larger novel takes up this search for a liberatory truth, nominally Christian but really entrusted to anyone who can see the suffering of others… show more.

Zadie Smith’s first ‘historical’ novel does not disappoint. This is a wonderfully written, witty, richly imagined, characteristically idiosyncratic book.

This intriguing book is set in the nineteenth century and peopled with historical figures—the now little-known novelist William Ainsworth, his housekeeper, the fascinating Mrs. Touchet, Charles Dickens, Andrew Bogle, a man born into slavery in Jamaica, who becomes a key witness in a real-life Victorian cause celebre.

Intricately structured, at its heart one finds a powerful, compelling story within a story which gives a force to the book. The issues raised within the book—racism, colonialism, woman’s rights, populism, fake news—resonate in… show more.

In college, I specialized in the 19th-century English novel, so it was a special pleasure to read about William Harrison Ainsworth, a lesser novelist of the era who hobnobs with the likes of Dickens and Thackeray. It was laugh-out-loud fun to spend time in the literary salons imagined by the author, who has such a delightful gift for satire.

But there are so many other things going on in this sprawling novel—serious questions about British colonialism, the slave trade, and the giant class divides. And underlying all of it are questions of fraud – the actual historical case of a… show more.

For a long time I thought historical fiction was not for me, then I realised I was reading the wrong historical fiction books.

The Fraud had me chuckling alongside the revelatory history it brought to the page. It is not a short book, but the short chapters kept the pace moving along nicely, and I absolutely devoured huge chunks of this book on an overnight 11-hour flight when I most definitely should have been sleeping.

On a more serious note, the book reveals a lot about British society that still lingers today. It’s as much about the present as it… show more.