Booth by Karen Joy Fowler (Longlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize)

Longlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize From the Man Booker finalist and bestselling author of We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves comes an epic and intimate novel about the family behind one of the most infamous figures in American history: John Wilkes Booth.

In 1822, a secret family moves into a secret cabin some thirty miles northeast of Baltimore, to farm, to hide, and to bear ten children over the course of the next sixteen years. 

Junius Booth—breadwinner, celebrated Shakespearean actor, and master of the house in more ways than one—is at once a mesmerizing talent and a man of terrifying instability. 

One by one the children arrive, as year by year, the country draws frighteningly closer to the boiling point of secession and civil war. As the tenor of the world shifts, the Booths emerge from their hidden lives to cement their place as one of the country’s leading theatrical families.

But behind the curtains of the many stages they have graced, multiple scandals, family triumphs, and criminal disasters begin to take their toll, and the solemn siblings of John Wilkes Booth are left to reckon with the truth behind the destructively specious promise of an early prophecy.

Booth is a startling portrait of a country in the throes of change and a vivid exploration of the ties that make, and break, a family.

Reviews

Booth is a triumph! No one writes like Karen Joy Fowler. With wit, heart, and revelatory insight, she teases ghosts from their shadows, transforming the way we see the past, shedding new light on our troubled present. -- Ruth Ozeki

Accomplished, immersive, and profoundly satisfying. Booth is both highly relevant to modern life and a fully realised piece of fiction ... I can't praise it highly enough, what a range Karen Joy Fowler has. -- Cathy Rentzenbrink

Booth is a subtly devastating meditation on how the USA arrived at this troubled point in its present history by looking at a mid-nineteenth-century family. Its world - dense, granular, intricate - is created with immense care and precision ... This is her finest, most beautiful novel to date. -- Neel Mukherjee

With each book, Karen Joy Fowler masterfully fuses style with subject, prose with plot, and explores the terrifying power that parents wield. Booth brilliantly cracks open the history of a country and a family and shows us the private secrets and suspicions that run underneath. -- Jonathan Lee, author of The Great Mistake

The historical context [Fowler] offers is of a pre-Civil War America of deep moral divides, political differences tearing close families apart, populism and fanaticism run amok.

The similarities to today are riveting and chilling.

― Kirkus starred review

Product details Publisher ‏ : ‎ FABER ET FABER (March 1, 2022) Language ‏ : ‎ English Paperback ‏ : ‎ 480 pages ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1788169670 ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1788169677 Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.28 pounds Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.91 x 1.42 x 9.13 inches