Genre: Historical Fiction
Length: 464 pages
Audiobook Length: 13 hours and 30 minutes
First Published: 2023
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Publisher’s Description
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 realize. When Bogle finds himself in London, star witness in a celebrated case of imposture, he knows his future depends on telling the right story.
About Zadie Smith
Zadie Smith is the author of the novels White Teeth, The Autograph Man, The Fraud, On Beauty, NW, and Swing Time, as well as two collections of essays, Changing My Mind, Feel Free, and Grand Union. Visit the author’s website →
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