The fraud

• Verfasst von: Smith, Zadie [VerfasserIn]
• Titel: The fraud
• Verf.angabe: Zadie Smith
• Verlagsort: Dublin
• Verlag: Hamish Hamilton
• Jahr: 2023
• Umfang: 455 Seiten
• Fussnoten: Hier auch später erschienene, unveränderte Nachdrucke
• Weitere Titel: Auf dem Einband: A novel
• ISBN: 978-0-241-33700-4
• ISBN: 978-0-241-33699-1
• Dokumenttyp: Fiktionale Darstellung
• Sprache: eng
• RVK-Notation: HO 99900
• RVK-Notation: HN 9990
• K10plus-PPN: 1860359825

Abstract

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 sceptical. 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”—wherein a lower-class butcher from Australia claimed he was in fact the rightful heir of a sizable estate and title—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. . . . Based on real historical events, The Fraud is a dazzling novel about truth and fiction, Jamaica and Britain, fraudulence and authenticity and the mystery of “other people.”