adie Smith has spent a long time concertedly not writing historical fiction. Determined to stay in the present, she has been on guard against the lures of the past. But history got her in the end, calling her to a Victorian village called Willesden. Thank goodness: we need minds like hers on the job. The Fraud, her sixth novel, is partly about an enslaved man on a Jamaican sugar plantation, and it’s a comedy: those two things
