BookBrowse Reviews The Fraud by Zadie Smith

In a recent article for The New Yorker, Zadie Smith joked that she moved away from London, her childhood home and the primary subject of her work, because she didn't want to write a historical novel. "Any writer who lives in England for any length of time," she wrote, "will sooner or later find herself writing a historical novel, whether she wants to or not." I'm happy she caved to the pressure, though, because The Fraud is her most ambitious (and possibly best) work to date. The novel is anchored by the bizarre "Tichbourne Case" that gripped London in the 1870s, in which Arthur Orton, a butcher from Wapping, was put on trial for claiming to be Sir Roger Tichbourne, the long-presumed-dead heir of a vast fortune. But the trial is only a small aspect of the story. The plot spirals out far beyond the courtroom, grappling with class, gender, and racial politics from slave plantations in ...