The following version of this book was used to create the guide: Smith, Zadie. The Fraud. Penguin Press, 2023.

In the year of 1873, an aging woman named Eliza Touchet lives with her cousin, William, and his new bride, a woman named Sarah Wells. William, a former bestselling author who is now past his prime and largely forgotten, spends most of his days mired in memories of his former success, while Eliza is haunted by what she considers the great loss of her life: the death of William's wife, Frances, with whom Eliza carried on a short-lived but intense romantic affair. As Eliza struggles to know where to place her feelings of loss and failure—ones intensified by the fact that she has been sexually intimate with William, too—she begins to develop an interest in the infamous Tichborne trial, a case surrounding the potential fraudulence of a claimant to the Tichborne fortune.

Although Eliza looks down on Sarah because of her lower-class upbringing, she finds herself supporting Sarah's defense of the Tichborne claimant, which is counterintuitively founded on a latent knowledge that he is not the true inheritor of the estate. The pair begin attending the trial together and are impressed by the candor and honesty of one Andrew Bogle, a Black man who served the Tichborne family for decades and insists that the claimant is who he says he is. The prevalence of Bogle in Eliza's life, combined with William's insistence on writing a "Jamaican novel," causes Eliza to recall the period of her relationship with Frances during which their friendship fell apart because of Frances' intense abolitionism and the strain it put on their intimacy.

Sunk into melancholy by these recollections of Frances, Eliza begins further ruminating on the long history of dismissal and discrimination she has endured at the hands of William's literary coevals over the years. She recalls a particular dinner during which William and his friends relegated Eliza to servant duties, William's daughters to exile in the upstairs bedrooms, and Frances to her sickbed, and laments her silence in the face of the blatant misogyny the men displayed. She also recalls accompanying William and Charles Dickens to the house of a wealthy woman named Lady Blessington, whose opulence and promiscuity Eliza jointly resented and respected.

When William begins receiving menacing packages in the mail, it becomes clear to Eliza that he is being pursued by his former illustrator, George Cruikshank, who insists that none of William's ideas are his own and that he, Cruikshank, is the true progenitor of William's literary successes. As William grows increasingly irritable, he begins forcing Eliza and Sarah out of the house together, where they take solace in the Tichborne proceedings, an affair that increasingly seems, to Eliza, to operate more like a circus than a court of law. After one of these trial sessions, Eliza walks alone in the city and comes across a gravestone dedicated to a woman who inspired one of Charles Dickens' characters; she contemplates her own subordinate position to William and worries she will be remembered as such even after death.

Eliza finds herself thinking often about Jack Sheppard, William's only half-decent novel, and the fact that he wrote it during the period of time immediately following Frances' death. After a brief recess, the Tichborne trial resumes and Bogle takes the stand, an affair that invigorates Eliza until Sarah confronts her about the blatant classism that Eliza has long displayed toward her and punishes her by bringing her to a dolly shop in Stepney, knowing that the poverty there will make Eliza uncomfortable. Perhaps stirred by these accusations, Eliza approaches Bogle after one of the days of hearings and begs him to get a meal with her, an endeavor that proves successful in spite of the protestations of Bogle's son, Henry.

Bogle explains to Eliza that he was born on the Hope Plantation in Jamaica to his parents, Nonesuch and Maya, who were slaves on the plantation. After the death of his father, Bogle was recruited by one Edward Tichborne to work as his servant while he managed his affairs in England, and Bogle thus departed from the Hope Plantation while most of his associates there were left behind, even after the nominal abolition of slavery. Bogle is briefly able to return to Jamaica when Edward sends him there to help run the plantation, and he realizes he has grown distant from his culture, particularly upon learning that his mother has passed away while he has been attending to Edward in England.

After Edward brings Bogle back to England, he explains that he has changed his name to Edward Doughty in order to inherit money from his in-laws by way of his marriage to his wife, Kathryn. Bogle marries one of Kathryn's servants, Elizabeth, and begins spending more and more time with the Tichborne family, including a young boy named Roger, after Edward inherits a large estate following the death of his older brother. After Edward himself passes away, however, Bogle is dismissed by the new owners of the estate, granted a paltry annuity by Kathryn, and exiled to Australia, where he eventually meets a man claiming to be Roger (the claimant) and decides to return to England in order to support him in his trial.

Moved by Bogle's story—and more convinced than ever of the fraudulence of claimant—Eliza begins spending an increasing amount of time with Henry, who oversees a number of abolitionist and racial justice initiatives that Eliza feels compelled to begin contributing to. Unfortunately for Eliza, Henry sees through the these gestures as performative, and confronts Eliza about the arrogance and condescension of her efforts at advocacy; meanwhile, the trial increasingly turns to debauchery, in part because one of Tichborne's lawyers, a man named Kenealy, begins relying heavily on bluster and rhetoric rather than facts and evidence. Eventually, the claimant is found to be a fraud, William dies, and Eliza sinks into a future of failure, anonymity, and isolation.