Fiction

Truth and fiction. Jamaica and Britain. Who gets to tell their story? Zadie Smith returns with her first historical novel.

It is 1873.

Mrs Eliza Touchet is the Scottish housekeeper – and cousin by marriage – of a once famous novelist, now in decline, William Ainsworth, with whom she has lived for thirty years.

Mrs Touchet is a woman of many interests: literature, justice, abolitionism, class, her cousin, his wives, this life and the next. But she is also sceptical. She suspects her cousin of having no talent; his successful friend, Mr Charles Dickens, of being a bully and a moralist; and England of being a land of facades, in which nothing is quite what it seems.

Andrew Bogle meanwhile grew up enslaved on the Hope Plantation, Jamaica.

He knows every lump of sugar comes at a human cost. That the rich deceive the poor. And that people are more easily manipulated than they realise.

When Bogle finds himself in London, star witness in a celebrated case of imposture, he knows his future depends on telling the right story.

The ‘Tichborne Trial’ captivates Mrs Touchet and all of England. Is Sir Roger Tichborne really who he says he is? Or is he a fraud? Mrs Touchet is a woman of the world. Mr Bogle is no fool.

But in a world of hypocrisy and self-deception, deciding what is real proves a complicated task…

Based on real historical events, The Fraud is a dazzling novel about truth and fiction, Jamaica and Britain, fraudulence and authenticity, and the mystery of ‘other people’.

A CHILD WILL BE BORN WHO WILL CHANGE EVERYTHING

When a young American academic Talissa Adam offers to carry another woman’s child, she has no idea of the life-changing consequences.

Behind the doors of the Parn Institute, a billionaire entrepreneur plans to stretch the boundaries of ethics as never before. Through a series of IVF treatments, which they hope to keep secret, they propose an experiment that will upend the human race as we know it.

Seth, the baby, is delivered to hopeful parents Mary and Alaric, but when his differences start to mark him out from his peers, he begins to attract unwanted attention.

The Seventh Son is a spectacular examination of what it is to be human.

It asks the question: just because you can do something, does it mean you should? Sweeping between New York, London, and the Scottish Highlands, this is an extraordinary novel about unrequited love and unearned power.

From the author of the critically acclaimed Ithaca – A Sunday Times Historical Fiction Book of the Year – comes an exquisite and gripping new tale that breathes life into ancient myth. This is the story of Penelope of Ithaca, famed wife of Odysseus, as it has never been told before.

On the isle of Ithaca, Queen Penelope maintains a delicate balance of power. Many years ago, her husband, Odysseus, sailed to war with Troy and never came home.

In his absence, Penelope uses all her cunning to keep the peace – but this is shattered by the arrival of Orestes, king of Mycenae, and his sister Elektra.

Orestes’s hands are stained with his mother’s blood. Not so long ago, the son of Agamemnon took Queen Clytemnestra’s life on Ithaca’s sands. Now, racked with guilt, he is slowly losing his mind.

Penelope knows destruction will follow in his wake as surely as the Furies circle him.

His uncle, Menelaus, the battle-hungry king of Sparta, longs for Orestes’s throne – and if he can seize it, no one will be safe from his violent whims.

Trapped between two mad kings, Penelope fights to keep war from Ithaca’s shores. Her only allies are Elektra and Helen of Troy, Menelaus’s enigmatic wife. And watching over them all is the goddess Aphrodite, who has plans of her own.

Olivia fled her abusive marriage to return to her hometown and take over the family beekeeping business when her son, Asher, was six. Now, impossibly, her baby is six feet tall and in his last year of high school, a kind, good-looking, popular ice hockey star with a tiny sprite of a new girlfriend. Lily also knows what it feels like to start over – when she and her mother relocated to New Hampshire it was all about a fresh start.

She and Asher couldn’t help falling for each other, and Lily feels happy for the first time. But can she trust him completely? Then Olivia gets a phone call – Lily is dead, and Asher is arrested on a charge of murder. As the case against him unfolds, she realises he has hidden more than he’s shared with her.

And Olivia knows firsthand that the secrets we keep reflect the past we want to leave behind – and that we rarely know the people we love as well as we think we do.