Join the HCSF Reading Group to discuss The Fraud By Zadie Smith
In-Person Meeting
Sunday, July 12, 2026
4:30-6:00 pm Pacific
In-Person, San Francisco
Meeting location and details emailed to registrants the week of the meeting
HCSF Members: Free, but RSVP required
Non-Members: $10 Not a member? Register here for membership!
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Registration ends Friday, July 10
The Fraud
by Zadie Smith
2023 464 pages
British novelist Smith's first historical novel is set in Victorian England and based on the real-life Tichborne case, a notorious 19th-century trial where a butcher claimed to be a missing heir. The story follows Eliza Touchet, a housekeeper and cousin to a novelist, as she becomes fascinated by the trial, particularly the testimony of Andrew Bogle, a former slave from Jamaica. The novel explores themes of truth, class, race, and identity, connecting the historical scandal to contemporary issues of populism and social injustice. (Publisher)
In all of her books Smith has paid attention to a mixed-up London and particularly to Willesden, where she grew up. In this novel, she is quite actively digging into London’s history, trying to understand how a person like her, with European and Jamaican ancestry, came to exist here in the first place. What forces deposited Black people on these shores? With her multicultural eye she also gives us a London that is more racially mixed than that found in other novels about the period, a London of Lascar Indians, Africans, Chinese, Turks (NYT)
Questions about our meetings or how we choose our books?
Contact Kirsten Miclau
HCSF Reading Group Organizer
readinggroup@harvardclubsf.org