Anthony Cummins at Literary Review:
Zadie Smith’s first historical novel spins a tangled web around the knotty case of the Tichborne claimant, a long-running legal saga that divided Victorian Britain. The book’s title, The Fraud, ostensibly refers to Arthur Orton, a butcher who, in 1866, claimed (falsely, in the eyes of the law) that he was Sir Roger Tichborne, an aristocratic heir long presumed lost at sea. Yet in Smith’s crowded narrative – crafted to imply that the much-debated phenomena of polarisation and disinformation are hardly new – the frauds multiply, the titular slur clinging to everything from writing novels (for Smith, always a suspicious enterprise) to neoliberal economics.
Orton’s case serves largely as a backdrop for emotional drama in the household of another real-life figure, William Harrison Ainsworth, a contemporaneous author of bestselling potboilers who is now forgotten and, the novel shows, fell into neglect in his own lifetime, overshadowed by Charles Dickens and even reckoned by one of his publishers to have died before he actually did.
more here.