The Fraud

The first historical novel in Smith's spectacular career is built from the bones of two true stories from Victorian England: the forgotten literary life of William Harrison Ainsworth, a friend and rival of Dickens, and the once-celebrated Tichborne case, in which a man appeared to claim the fortune of a missing nobleman. But it is really the story of two other true—and usually secondary—figures: Eliza Touchet, Ainsworth's cousin and housekeeper, and Andrew Bogle, a black Jamaican servant who stood as one of the Tichborne claimant's main witnesses. And the real drama comes less from the story's public events, or from Smith's brilliance and language, which spark on every page, than the encounter of these two sensibilities: the thoughtful, liberal, and often brilliant Touchet, who chafes at injustice and the limits to her own freedom as a woman, and the equally thoughtful Bogle, whose life and testimony test the limits of Eliza's sympathies.
(I listened to the audiobook, superbly narrated by the author, via our partners at