The Fraud

"One of the biggest books of the season, for example, is Zadie Smith’s new novel, The Fraud. It’s a work of historical fiction—her first—set in Victorian England, and exploring art-that-imitates-life, abolitionism, and a scandalous case of identity theft that gripped the nation. It was an instant New York Times bestseller and has garnered some brilliant reviews in the three weeks it has been out so far. ( The Observer said it was “almost flawless… her funniest novel yet.”) What I’ve most enjoyed about the publicity around its publication has been Smith’s own essay in The New Yorker in which she reflects wryly on English literary nostalgia (“any writer who lives in England for any length of time will sooner or later find herself writing a historical novel, whether she wants to or not”)—and now her own place in that movement, having folded and produced such a novel herself. When, finally, she put fingers to keyboard, she had one self-imposed rule: “My pride rested now on one principle: no Dickens.” Alas, in Victorian Britain, Charles Dickens is unavoidable, and it soon transpires that the author was tangled in the real-life events that inspired the novel. No point in resisting: “I let him pervade my pages, in the same way he stalks through nineteenth-century London.” Look out for two-time National Book Award-winner Jesmyn Ward’s fourth novel, Let Us Descend, billed as a “a reimagining of American slavery” in which a young enslaved woman communicates with spirits of another realm. In a preview, Publishers Weekly called it “wrenching and beautifully told.” (Released October 24.) Lauren Groff ( Matrix, Fates & Furies) returns with a historical novel set in 17th-century colonial America. The Vaster Wilds follows a servant girl who has escaped from starving Jamestown and must now survive “the great and terrible wilderness”; seen through the eyes of this pious young woman, the landscape takes on a mystical air of unreality, like a religious trial. A Book of Job in the New World."