A LATEST BSC GRAPHIC NOVEL! Mary Anne should never have thrown away that chain letter she got in the mail. Ever since she did, bad things have been happening to everyone in the Baby-sitters Club. What kind of spooky thing will happen next with Halloween coming up? Then she finds a bad-luck charm who sent the charm? And why did they send it?

The chronicler of contemporary London, acclaimed and bestselling author Zadie Smith, returns with her first historical novel Truth and fiction. Jamaica and Britain. Who gets to tell their story? In her first historical novel, Zadie Smith transports the reader to a Victorian England transfixed by the real-life trial of the Tichborne Claimant, in which a cockney butcher, recently returned from Australia, lays claim to the Tichborne baronetcy, with his former slave Andrew Bogle as star witness. Watching the proceedings, and with her own story to tell, is Eliza Touchet - cousin, housekeeper and perhaps more - to failing novelist William Harrison Ainsworth. From literary London to the Jamaica's sugar-cane plantations, Zadie Smith weaves an enthralling story linking the rich and the poor, the free and the enslaved, and the comic and the tragic.

Details

ISBN13: 9780241983096
Format: Paperback / softback
Number of Pages: 464
Edition:
Publication Date: 10 Sep 2024
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Publication City, Country: London, United Kingdom
Dimensions (cm): 196(H)x130(L)x27(W)322
Weight (gm): 322

Author Biography

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. The Fraud is her first historical novel.

Reviews

No one understands humans better. As this novel shows, there is no better guide to people and their bottomlessness than Smith herself * iNews *
This was really delightful. 10/10. Zadie Smith is a genius -- Brandon Taylor author of The Late Americans
A novel full of people, ideas, humour, feeling and something like moral truth – the stuff of life * Evening Standard *
Searingly original [and] virtuosic . . . the book masterfully depicts post-emancipation Britain as it ruptures along faultlines of class and race * Vogue *
Brilliant. A Dickensian delight * Los Angeles Times *
The Fraud is unlike anything you’ll read this year: a charismatic, cerebral novel that asks us to consider the greatest fraud of all, that of one man claiming to hold the key to another’s freedom * Irish Times *
Affecting and devastating . . . In typical Zadie style, the narrative structure and decade leaping require you to pay attention – but you’re heavily rewarded with the sheer breadth of the novel and its vividly painted characters * Independent, '24 best summer books 2024' *
A wonderful meditation on truth and falsehood, and the boundaries between fact and fiction * Spectator *
A rich and sprawling novel with a terrific cast of characters, this is Smith at her best * The i Paper, 'Best new paperbacks for summer' *
A big, rich saga, tumbling with characters and big issues (feminism, slavery, truth) * The Times, 'Best Novels of 2023' *