Booth

Listed in the Theater category on Art In Fiction, Booth  (2022) by Karen Joy Fowler was longlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize. 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. "Vignetted at the edges, full of portents, omens and mysterious reversals of fate . . . [Fowler’s] sentences often sing.” – The New York Times Book Review Karen Joy Fowler is the New York Times  bestselling author of several novels, including The Jane Austen Book Club  and We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves , which was the winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award and shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. She lives in Santa Cruz, California. Buy Now from Amazon Buy Now from Bookshop Find other novels by Karen Joy Fowler on Art In Fiction .