Smith’s dazzling historical novel combines deft writing and strenuous construction in a tale of literary London and the horrors of slavery’ Guardian There are multiple parts to the story. It worked best when Smith concentrated on Eliza Touchet, the cousin by marriage of William Ainsworth. Through her eyes, we get to see the “Tichborne trial” when Roger Castro, an Australian butcher attempts to prove he is the true Lord Roger Tichborne. Andrew Bogle is a former Jamaican slave who swears that the claimant is truly Lord Tichborne. There’s a whole section devoted to his past and while I get why Smith wrote it, it also took me out of the primary story.

Have you ever spent a dinner in the company of men who fancy themselves rather the intellectuals? The ego stroking and egging, the name dropping, the astonishing degree to which well educated, well travelled, men can hold such ill informed opinions. The fraud is referencing The Tichborne Trial that is the lifeline of the novel, every other theme is springing from it, chosen by Smith perhaps because:Rapture. Beauty. Grace translated - made visible. Had she ever truly heard music until this moment? Even though the last one is about Ainsworths, it reminded me of reading David Copperfield and Shirley. UPDATE: I just discovered this July, 2023, New Yorker article in which Smith describes her reasons for the book and her process of writing it over several years. Delightful and something I wish I had read before reading the book.

But Smith’s age at the time — 26 — must have felt positively geriatric to me. It was only when I started publishing in my 20s that I could appreciate what a prodigy Smith was; and throughout my career she has remained a startling (and despair-inducing) beacon of what a writer can achieve at a young age. An undergraduate when she embarked on “White Teeth,” she was not yet 30 when she published — to my mind — her masterpiece, “On Beauty,” a wise, sad and hilarious book about American race relations that would have justly been called a great American social novel had the American literary scene at that time been more attuned to race as a theme.I would get caught up in Eliza Touchet's story and then would be jerked away to the trial of The Claimant, a man who claimed to be Robert Tichborne, heir to the Tichborne estate. Touchet is the narrator of the book, both of the author salons she was witness to and the trial. I often wondered what she felt was the more important story! I did love Eliza's character and Zadie did a marvelous job of voicing her. It’s difficult to give any idea of how extraordinary this book is. One of the great historical novels, certainly. But has any historical novel ever combined such brilliantly researched and detailed history with such intensely imagined fiction? Or such a range of living, breathing, surprising characters with such an idiosyncratically structured narrative?’ Michael Frayn