Eliza Touchet is a Scottish widow running the household of her cousin, a once-famous novelist now writing books nobody reads, in Victorian England. She becomes obsessed with the Tichborne trial — a butcher from Australia claiming to be a missing aristocratic heir, a case that gripped the country for years — and above all with Andrew Bogle, the formerly enslaved Jamaican man whose testimony holds the impostor’s story together. Smith gives Bogle his own long section on a Jamaican plantation, which is the heart of the book. It’s her first historical novel and left a lot of people obsessed with it.
The Fraud