Hello and welcome to Gap Fest Reads for the month of September.

I'm Emily Vasan, one of the hosts of Slade's political Gap Fest.

Zadi Smith is the author of some novels I love, including White Teeth and on Beauty and

NW. She is also a dazzling essayist. Zadi is here to talk about her far-ranging new historical

novel, The Fraud.

The Fraud begins in 1873 and ranges back and forth to the 1830s.

It's told mostly from the perspective of Eliza Touche, a cousin by marriage and former

lover of the very bad English novelist William Harrison Ainsworth.

He was a real person who at one point outsold Charles Dickens, which he does not want

anyone to forget. Eliza Touche is keeping house for Ainsworth, his three unmarried daughters

and his young new wife who used to be the family servant.

What's the back job for what's really the centerpiece of the story, which is the

Titchborne trial?

This is also an event pulled from real life.

Sir Roger Titchborne was the heir to a wealthy family in England who was apparently

lost at sea.

But wait, a man who claims to be Titchborne, who probably was really a butcher named Arthur

Orton, appears in England claims to be Sir Roger Titchborne rescued.

And very interestingly, the former valet of the real Sir Roger Titchborne, a former

slave named Andrew Bogle, shows up in court to vouch for this claimant, this Titchborne

claimant.

So this is a novel about truth and fiction, and the central question in I think is who

...