Booth: A Novel
by Karen Joy Fowler
Buy on AmazonBest Book of the Year Real Simple • AARP • USA Today • NPR • Virginia Living 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.…
Recommended by
"How did the spawn of an abolitionist, vegetarian father become the rabid secessionist who assassinated Abraham Lincoln? That question underpins this gripping novel, but Karen Joy Fowler also centers John Wilkes Booth’s family members: among them, father Junius, a wildly famous Shakespearean actor as well as a manic drunk, and sister Rosalie, retrieved from obscurity and given a story of her own. Booth is historical fiction, but it’s impossible to ignore the resonance with present-day America. In her author’s note, Fowler writes: “The more I read of Lincoln’s warnings concerning the tyrant and the mob … the more brightly lit the road from there to here became.”"
NPR Books We Love — 2022 · apps.npr.org