Booth

By: Karen Joy Fowler

Narrated by: January LaVoy

LONGLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 2022

Sunday Times Book of the Month

SIX BROTHERS AND SISTERS. ONE INJUSTICE THAT WILL SHATTER THEIR BOND FOREVER

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

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.

©2022 Karen Joy Fowler (P)2022 Hachette Audio UK

Critic reviews

"In its stretch and imaginative depth, Booth has an utterly seductive authority." (Guardian)

Fascinating

She doesn’t say so in the notes, but it seems to me that Ms Fowler wasn’t interested in writing the book unless the rest of the Booth family was worth a book on their own - not just because of what their brother and son did.

They are. So much in this story seems thrillingly current - African Americans fight for rights, and are killed. Those who join that fight are despised, shot. And so it goes.