Zadie Smith

On September 16th there is a special event in partnership with Hurst Festival when Zadie Smith will be at Holy Trinity Church in Hurstpierpoint at 7.30pm talking about her recently published book Fraud.

Zadie Smith is one of the most distinctive, exciting and widely admired novelists of her generation.  Twice shortlisted and once winner of the Women’s Prize for Fiction, shortlisted for the Booker Prize, she has twice been named among Granta 20 Best Young British novelists.

Fraud is her first historical novel, and in it she transports the reader to a Victorian England transfixed by the real-life trial of the Tichborne Claimant, in which a Cockney butcher, recently returned from Australia, lays claim to the Tichborne baronetcy, with his former slave Andrew Bogle as star witness. Watching the proceedings, and with her own story to tell, is Eliza Touchet – cousin, housekeeper and perhaps more – to failing novelist William Harrison Ainsworth.

From literary London to Jamaica’s sugar-cane plantations, Zadie Smith weaves an enthralling story linking the rich and the poor, the free and the enslaved and the comic and the tragic.
What makes this the perfect title for a joint event are the references in the book to local places:  there’s a chapter entitled Cuckfield Park and in another chapter headed Hurstpierpoint, West Sussex, the heroine says how much she likes ‘its quiet tea room, the bakery, the fishmonger’s’.

Zadie will be in conversation with Peter Guttridge, local Hurst resident.