Booth
by Karen Joy Fowler· 2022
A nineteenth-century saga of a thespian family whose six siblings come to adulthood in the shadow of the American Civil War. Booth tells the story of the brilliant and disastrously ill-fated Booth family. Junius is the patriarch, a celebrated Shakespearean actor who fled bigamy charges in England, both a talent and a man of terrifying instability. As his children grow up in a remote farmstead in 1820s 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 novel focused on the very things that bind, and break, a family.
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A nineteenth-century saga of a thespian family whose six siblings come to adulthood in the shadow of the American Civil War. Booth tells the story of the brilliant and disastrously ill-fated Booth family. Junius is the patriarch, a celebrated Shakespearean actor who fled bigamy charges in England, both a talent and a man of terrifying instability. As his children grow up in a remote farmstead in 1820s 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 novel focused on the very things that bind, and break, a family.