Booth

Author: Fowler Karen Joy

Color: Purple

Number Of Pages: 480

Details: Product Description

Best 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. 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.

Review

Most Anticipated Books 2022
Kirkus Reviews • Entertainment Weekly •Virginia Living • Veranda • The Millions • Medium • CNN

One of New York Post’s Best Books of the Month

“Gripping novel….Booth is historical fiction, but it’s impossible to ignore the resonance with present-day America.” —NPR

“[Fowler] demonstrates how family tragedies ripple out from the source, causing trauma on an exponential scale. It’s hard to read her story of the Booth family and not think of those whose lives have been upended by senseless acts of personal or political violence….To know Booth, to fully reckon with who he was and to grapple with why he did what he did, is to have a window on the modern United States.” —Los Angeles Review of Books

“Fowler’s riveting saga explores these strains of familial devotion and sorrow connecting the colorful Booth brothers and sisters.” –Washington Post

“An ambitious novel . . . Slow-burning and rich, it illuminates America’s core contradictions.” —People Magazine

“Vignetted at the edges, full of portents, omens and mysterious reversals of fate . . . [Fowler’s] sentences often sing.” –The New York Times Book Review

“Fate, history, and chance collide in Karen Joy Fowler’s riveting historical novel. . . . What elevates Booth is the granular texture of what’s beneath the bald facts: the how and the myriad whats and whys, the truths. And there is also Fowler’s trademark dark humor. . . . A massive achievement. In it, Fowler weaves history, family culture, and human cruelties into an insightful reckoning of a past that seems too much a prologue to our American present.” —Boston Globe

“Booth doesn’t hold anyone in judgment; like all the best literature, it seeks to better understand the human heart in all its flawed complexity. It’s a haunting book, not just for all its literal ghosts, but for its suggestion that those ghosts still have not been exorcised from this country.” —USA Today

“Masterful . . . A dazzling blend of fact and fiction with piercing echoes to today . . . Fowler’s excavation of this material is astonishing in its breadth and specificity, treating events of historical record with the same detail and care as secret bedtime talks and plays staged in treetops.” —San Francisco Chronicle

“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 Reviews (starred review)

“Razor-sharp…Fowler sets the stage in rem

Release Date: 08-03-2022

Package Dimensions: 42x235x682