Description |
1 online resource |
Summary |
"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. The "Tichborne Trial"-wherein a lower-class butcher from Australia claimed he was in fact the rightful heir of a sizable estate and title-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.""-- Provided by publisher. |
System Details |
Requires Boundless App. |
Subject |
Orton, Arthur, 1834-1898 -- Trials, litigation, etc. -- Fiction.
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Ainsworth, William Harrison, 1805-1882 -- Fiction.
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Impostors and imposture -- Fiction.
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Housekeepers -- Fiction.
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Cousins -- Fiction.
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Trials -- Fiction.
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London (England) -- Fiction.
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Genre |
Novels.
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Historical fiction.
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Other Form: |
Print version: Smith, Zadie. Fraud New York : Penguin Press, 2023 9780525558965 (DLC) 2023022290 |
ISBN |
9780525558972 |
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0525558977 |
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