White Teeth, Zadie Smith’s 2000 debut, established her as a writer of lively, zeitgeist-observing comic novels. With The Fraud, her sixth novel and her first work of historical fiction, she takes on the challenge of training her eye on the more alien world of 19th century Britain. In an elaborate narrative threading fiction around real figures and events, she asks questions about identity, legitimacy, and posterity. Who determines the truth in a hotly conflicted public debate? Who gets left in, or out, of the historical record? What does it mean to inherit something, and what is an honest inheritance? The result is interesting and uneven.

The Fraud; By Zadie Smith; Penguin Press; 464 pp., $29.00

A real, though now mostly forgotten, event sits at the heart of this complicated and at times confusing novel. In 1854, a British aristocrat and former military officer, Roger Tichborne, went missing in a shipwreck off South America. His heartbroken mother, having heard rumors that survivors of the wreck had been picked up by a ship bound for Australia, placed newspaper ads seeking her son.