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Hamish Hamilton announces Zadie Smith’s ‘dazzling’ new novel The Fraud
Hamish Hamilton has unveiled Zadie Smith’s new novel The Fraud, a “kaleidoscopic work of historical fiction set against the legal trial that divided Victorian England, about who deserves to tell their story – and about who deserves to be believed.”
Publisher Simon Prosser bought UK & Commonwealth rights from Georgia Garrett at Rogers, Coleridge and White in a deal for two books struck in 2017. The Fraud will be published by Hamish Hamilton in the UK in hardback, e-book and audio on September 7th 2023, and simultaneously in the US by Penguin Press.
The novel opens in 1873. The synopsis reads: “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 30 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 and his successful friend, Mr Charles Dickens, of being a bully and a moralist. She also suspects 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 realise. 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 sizeable 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 described by the publisher as “a dazzling novel about truth and fiction, Jamaica and Britain, fraudulence and authenticity and the mystery of other people.”
Bea Carvalho, fiction buyer at Waterstones, said: “The arrival of Zadie Smith’s The Fraud undoubtedly marks one of the biggest and most important moments in 2023’s literary calendar. Zadie is a huge favourite among booksellers and Waterstones customers, and we know that this announcement will be met with enormous excitement in all of our bookshops.
“That The Fraud is Zadie’s first work of historical fiction makes this release even more exciting, as it presents an opportunity to share her voice with a brand new readership, who will then go on to discover her body of work as a whole.”
