This is fresh air, I'm Terry Gross. My guest Sadie Smith writes novels and essays about contemporary

life and art. She says she'd been prejudiced against historical novels, but she's just written one,

said in Victorian England. It's called The Fraud. At its center is the year's long trial that ended

in 1873 of a butcher who claimed to be Sir Roger Tickborn, the missing heir to the Tickborn

estate and the title of Baronette. A witness who testified on his behalf, Andrew Bogle,

had been enslaved on a sugar plantation in Jamaica, which was then a British colony.

After enslaved people on the island were emancipated, in 1834,

Bogle worked for a member of the Tickborn family. Half of the book is told through the

point of view of Mrs. Eliza Touche, a widow in an era when widows had no means of supporting

themselves. She became the housekeeper for her late husband's cousin, a once famous writer,

who remained prolific but had lost whatever talent he had formerly possessed and was forgotten.

After she gets caught up in watching the trial, she asked Bogle to tell her his story. The second

half of the book is about Bogle, the man formerly enslaved in Jamaica, the novel is based on real

events and real people and examines British slavery as well as class, race, gender, and fraudulence

during the Victorian era. Sadie Smith is British, her mother is black and emigrated to England from

Jamaica, her late father was British and white. Smith became a critically acclaimed bestselling

author in her mid-twenties with the publication of her novel White Teeth. Her other novels include

On Beauty and Swing Time. She's also a regular contributor to the New Yorker and the New York

Review of Books. Sadie Smith, welcome back to Fresh Air and congratulations on your new novel.

There's several different kinds of imprisonment or potential imprisonment in your book.

There's the enslavement of Andrew Bogle, the possible imprisonment of the man on trial,

and a more existential prison of Eliza Touche. She lives within the restrictions surrounding women

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