The Fraud

In 1870s London, Eliza Touchet keeps house for her cousin by marriage, William Ainsworth, a once-celebrated novelist now eclipsed by the friend and rival he outlived, Charles Dickens. Sharp-eyed and unillusioned, Eliza finds herself drawn to the sensational Tichborne trial, in which a coarse butcher back from Australia claims to be Sir Roger Tichborne, the long-lost heir to a great fortune. The claimant's most devoted supporter is Andrew Bogle, a dignified older man born into slavery on a Jamaican plantation, whose testimony carries the weight of a life Eliza has never had to imagine. Moving between a stuffy English household, a courtroom transfixing the nation, and the brutal sugar estates of Jamaica, Smith builds a wide Victorian canvas about class, race, truth, and who gets to decide another person's worth.