BOOTH
Longlisted for the Booker Prize 2022
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4.6 • 5 Ratings
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- £4.99
Publisher Description
LONGLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 2022
A SUNDAY TIMES HISTORICAL NOVEL OF THE YEAR 2022
AS HEARD ON BBC RADIO 4 OPEN BOOK
'Brilliantly recounts the story of the American theatrical dynasty that produced Lincoln's assassin' Sunday Times Book of the Month
In 1822, a stage is set: Englishman Junius Booth - celebrated Shakespearean actor and man of mesmerising charm and instability - moves to a remote cabin outside Baltimore with his wife, who bears him ten children.
Of the six who survive infancy, one is John Wilkes - the hot-tempered but much-loved middle son who, in 1865, fatally shoots Abraham Lincoln in a Washington theatre, changing the course of history.
What makes a murderer? His family or the world? And how can those who love him ever come to terms with his actions? Strikingly relevant to the world today, Booth is the story of one extraordinary family and the terrible act that shattered their bonds forever.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Infamous assassin and racist John Wilkes Booth was raised in a staunchly abolitionist family of Shakespearean actors. This tension shapes Karen Joy Fowler’s sweeping yet intimate portrait of American discord. Set in the years leading up to the US Civil War, Booth begins on a remote Maryland farm and charts the domestic dramas and political fortunes that shaped Abraham Lincoln’s killer, from the painful rifts between siblings to the seething, volatile anger of an emergent populist movement. Fowler’s elegant prose reads almost like poetry, which only highlights the novel’s building sense of doom. This is historical fiction at its very best: urgent, provocative and unnervingly timely.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The Booth in the title of Booker-shortlisted Fowler's razor-sharp latest (after We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves) is John Wilkes Booth, Abraham Lincoln's assassin. The author approaches "Johnny" obliquely, through his family circle in Maryland. Booth's father, Junius Brutus Booth, is a Shakespearean actor whose masterly Richard III and "towering genius" are offset by episodes of "mad freaks." (He's also a drunken failure of a father.) Cycles of depression triggered by Junius's endless indiscretions and prolonged absences define Booth's mother. Three siblings in this theatrical family are central: eldest sister Rosalie is "painfully shy" and has scoliosis; brother Edwin, like Junius a "star" actor, is prone to drink; and beautiful sister Asia is "strong and stormy," "ice and iron." Others, such as the Halls—a Black family, some of whom are free and others enslaved—also play parts. All illuminate the depressingly bizarre rearing of Johnny and the disgruntled, attention-seeking actor he becomes. As Congress passes the 13th amendment to abolish slavery and General Lee surrenders, Booth's acting career falters and his Southern sympathies rise, building toward the fateful night that will forever define him and his family. Fowler sets the stage in remarkable prose, and in her account of the Booth family's move from rural Maryland to Baltimore in 1846 ("Instead of frogs, choruses of drunks sing on the street after dark. Instead of birdcalls, factory whistles"), she subtly conveys the depth of her characters, noting that Johnny, at seven, takes on the "city name" Wilkes. Throughout, the nuanced plot is both historically rigorous and richly imagined. This is a winner.
