Zadie Smith’s The Fraud is an historical novel about the famed Tichborne Trial, and it was named one of the Best Books of 2023 by both The New York Times and The New Yorker.
The Iron Book Discussion Group will judge the story for themselves during the group’s next meeting in September 2025.
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BOOK DESCRIPTION
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. 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” 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…
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Copies of The Fraud can be picked up from the Book Discussion Shelf on our first floor, and it’s also available digitally as an ebook (through Overdrive/Libby) or an audiobook (through Overdrive/Libby).
An in-person discussion of The Fraud will be held at the library on Tuesday, September 9, at 7:00 PM. No registration is required, so please join us if you’d like to be part of the discussion.
Published on August 15, 2025.
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