Booth (Booker Longlisted 2022)

Description

‘Booth is a triumph!’ Ruth Ozeki

‘Accomplished, immersive and profoundly satisfying’ Cathy Rentzenbrink

‘Her finest, most beautiful novel to date’ Neel Mukherjee

‘Effortlessly resonant… breathes rich imaginative colour in her characters’ Daily Telegraph

‘Karen Joy Fowler’s novels are wildly inventive and deservedly popular’ Daily Mail

‘In its stretch and imaginative depth, Booth has an utterly seductive authority’Guardian

‘Captures with enthralling vividness a country caught in the grip of fanatical populism, ripped apart by irreconcilable political differences and boiling with fury and rage …. An unalloyed triumph’ Literary Review

‘Brilliantly recounts the story of the American theatrical dynasty that produced Lincoln’s assassin’ Sunday Times Book of the Month

From the Booker-shortlisted, million-copy bestselling author of We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves comes an epic novel about the infamous, ill-fated Booth family.

As heard on BBC Radio 4 Open Book

SIX BROTHERS AND SISTERS.

ONE INJUSTICE THAT WILL SHATTER THEIR BOND FOREVER

Junius is the patriarch, a celebrated Shakespearean actor who fled bigamy charges in England, both a mesmerising talent and a man of terrifying instability. As his children grow up in a remote farmstead in 1830s rural Baltimore, the country draws ever closer to the boiling point of secession and civil war.

Of the six Booth siblings who survive to adulthood, each has their own dreams they must fight to realise – but it is Johnny who makes the terrible decision that will change the course of history – the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. Booth is a riveting novel focused on the very things that bind, and break, a family.