Zadie Smith’s sonorous tones reverberate around our sun dappled studio. Throughout the day I move from laptop to coffee machine, listening via audiobook as lambastic characters fill the room, her narration capturing perfectly the depth of identity Smith crafts so well.
The Fraud, Smith’s first historical fiction is set in 1800’s North London and follows the Tichborne trial, a historical cause célèbre that captivated England. The case ostensibly revolves around Arthur Orton - a butcher who declared himself as Sir Roger Tichborne, an aristocratic heir presumed lost at sea. Disinformation and fraudulence ensue.
The court case serves as a landscape within which we see our characters interpret truth. We meet a dark haired, Eliza Touchet, a housekeeper for her mediocre writer cousin William Ainsworth. Ainsworth is a historical novelist and a man who has dedicated himself to fiction with very little talent for actually writing it. These central characters are real life historical figures. Smith smudges the crisp categories we place around the genre of fiction, challenging its definition not only in her world building, but in her character's personal truths.
‘One lifetime was not enough to understand a people and the words they used and the way they thought and lived.’
We observe interactions and interpret misinformation through the divided lens of character. As with all of Smith’s writing, there are layers of analysis painted over each page. We learn what happens to truth when it’s viewed through all lenses. Smith’s critical eye is also ever present in her writing as we weave across bite size chapters in a complex, sometimes baffling narrative.
The craft and question of fiction is at the heart of this novel, with Zadie Smith painting somewhat of a self portrait with her words. At times The Fraud felt like a motley combination of episodes, but there is no doubt that Zadie Smith’s mind is one of robust cleverness. After seven years, we feel lucky to read (or listen) to her writing once again.
Find The Fraud here.
Zadie Smith is the author of the novels White Teeth, The Autograph Man, On Beauty, NW and Swing Time; as well as a novella, The Embassy of Cambodia; three collections of essays, Changing My Mind, Feel Free and Intimations; a collection of short stories, Grand Union; and the play, The Wife of Willesden, adapted from Chaucer. She is also the editor of The Book of Other People. Zadie Smith was born in north-west London, where she still lives.
Image via Elle. Photographer R Burman. Words by Pages Editorial.
Selected by the Editor.
A new collection—about loss, alienation, aging, and the strangeness of contemporary life—by the award-winning, and inimitable, author of The Book of Goose.
A grieving mother makes a spreadsheet of everyone she’s lost. Elsewhere, a professor develops a troubled intimacy with her hairdresser. And every year, a restless woman receives an email from a strange man twice her age and several states away. In Yiyun Li’s stories, people strive for an ordinary existence until doing so becomes unsustainable, until the surface cracks and the grand mysterious forces—death, violence, estrangement—come to light. And even everyday life is laden with meaning, studded with indelible details: a filched jar of honey, a mound of wounded ants, a photograph kept hidden for many years, until it must be seen.
Li is a truly original writer, an alchemist of opposites: tender and unsentimental, metaphysical and blunt, funny and horrifying, omniscient and unusually aware of just how much we cannot know. Beloved for her novels and memoirs, she returns here to her earliest form, gathering pieces that have appeared in The New Yorker, Zoetrope, and elsewhere. Taken together, the stories in Wednesday's Child, written over the span of a decade, articulate the cost, both material and emotional, of living—exile, assimilation, loss, love—with her trademark unnerving beauty and wisdom. A taut and electrifying novel from celebrated bestselling author Lauren Groff, about one spirited girl alone in the wilderness, trying to survive
“Extraordinary… staggering…with wrenching beauty…This is a triumph.” –Publishers Weekly, Starred Review
“Must be read…The writing is inspired, the imaginative power near mystic.” –Kirkus Reviews
Words by Macmillan Publishers
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