The Fraud by Zadie Smith

The author is a great story teller and this book is no exception. She has chosen real historical events and has interwoven them into a tale that takes place in the 1860's England. The first is a butcher with a shadowy past who claimed that he was Sir Roger Tichborne, the presumed-dead son of Lady Tichborne and the heir to a vast fortune. The evidence against the butcher seemed overwhelming: He could not remember his supposed classmates, could not recall basic facts of a gentleman’s education and could not even speak French, Tichborne’s first language. The second strand is Eliza Touchet, another forgotten figure. A young widow of limited resources, Eliza moved into her cousin’s house to fill an ambiguous role as hostess and housekeeper. For several years, she enjoyed — or endured — a curious position in London’s literary scene because her cousin was William Harrison Ainsworth, a prolific author who on occasion outsold Charles Dickens. The syncopated arrangement of these chapters jumps back and forth in time, placing Ainsworth’s youthful popularity in contrast to his later years of panicked self-doubt. But the focus remains on the mysterious Eliza — so externally polite, so internally acute — struggling till the end of her life to divine what to believe when the human condition is essentially fraudulent.