Zadie Smith

The British star author surprises with a historical novel about a Victorian-era con artist who seduces the masses. The current reference to Donald Trump is intentional. The ingeniously composed novel 'The Fraud' discusses themes such as identity and fake news - atmospherically dense and extremely entertaining.

London in the 19th century: Mrs. Eliza Touchet is the Scottish housekeeper and distant cousin of the once-successful writer William Ainsworth. Eliza is lively and critical. She doubts Ainsworth's talent and fears that England is a land of facades, where nothing is as it seems. With her sister-in-law, she attends the court proceedings of the Tichborne Case, in which a rough man claims to be the long-lost son of the wealthy Lady Tichborne. Andrew Bogle, a former slave from Jamaica, is one of the main witnesses in the trial. Eliza and Bogle strike up a conversation and get closer to the truth. But whose truth counts?

Based on real historical events, Fraud is a dazzling novel about truth and fiction, Jamaica and Great Britain, deception and authenticity, and the mystery of otherness.

Zadie Smith was born in 1975 as the daughter of an Englishman and a Jamaican woman in northwest London. She studied English literature at King's College. She later taught literature in the USA and became a professor of creative writing at New York University. With her debut novel White Teeth (2000) about multicultural London, she became instantly famous. Her subsequent novels and essays were also international bestsellers and received numerous awards. She was awarded, among others, the Orange Prize, the World Literature Prize, and the Austrian State Prize for European Literature. Today, she lives with her family in London.