Village people - A celebrated court case links Victorian England with slavery in Jamaica in Zadie Smith's gripping historical novel

Zadie Smith has spent a long time concertedly not writing historical fiction.

- Alexandra Harris

Determined to stay in the present, she has been on guard against the lures of the past. But history got her in the end, calling her to a Victorian village called Willesden. Thank goodness: we need minds like hers on the job. The Fraud, her sixth novel, is partly about an enslaved man on a Jamaican sugar plantation, and it’s a comedy: those two things at once. Few would dare; fewer could pull it off as Smith does here, mixing narrative delight with a vein of rapid, skimming satire as she sketches scenes of life in 19th-century England and the Caribbean.

The novel is a complicated mosaic of episodes from interleaved plots. Much of it follows a court case that gripped the British public in the 1870s. Sir Roger Tichborne, heir to a baronetcy and a fortune, was thought lost at sea, but a cockney born butcher in Australia declared himself to be Sir Roger and set out to London to prove his identity. The hearings extended over years.

In parlours across England, evening newspapers were scoured for Tichborne developments. We cross the threshold into one particular household, the home of the real-life novelist William Ainsworth, his young wife Sarah, and the woman who has shared her life with him over 40 years: Eliza Touchet.