KAREN JOY FOWLER

“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.”—
Apple Books

From the Man Booker finalist and bestselling author of *We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves* comes an epic 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 all ways—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 closer to the boiling point of secession and civil war.

As the children grow and the tenor of the world shifts, the Booths 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 disasters begin to take their toll. A startling portrait of a country in the throes of change and a vivid exploration of brother- and sisterhood, Booth is a riveting historical novel focused on the very things that bind, and break, a family.
Paperback now available!

“Booth is a triumph! No one writes like Karen Joy Fowler, and in this gripping family saga, she has taken a piece of American history we thought we knew and told it slant. With wit, heart, and revelatory insight, she teases ghosts from their shadows, transforming the way we see the past, shedding new light on our troubled present.”

— Ruth Ozeki, author of The Book of Form and Emptiness

“Like Tolstoy before her, and Natalia Ginzburg, Karen Joy Fowler understands that the only way to write about history is as clattery, complex dramas of ordinary people and their families—they become the stuff of history later. Booth is a subtly devastating meditation. . . . Its world—dense, granular, intricate—is created with immense care and precision, and rendered in prose of limpid, lyrical beauty. This is her finest, most beautiful novel to date.”

— Neel Mukherjee, author of A State of Freedom

“What an extraordinary story. What a family. Gripping, clever, and the central issue is alive and kicking today."”

— Sir Tom Courtenay

“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)
“Razor-sharp…Fowler sets the stage in remarkable prose….The nuanced plot is both historically rigorous and richly imagined. This is a winner.”—Publishers Weekly (starred)
“Like the very best historical novels, Booth is a literary feast, offering much more than a riveting story and richly drawn characters. It offers a wealth of commentary about not only our past but also where we are today, and where we may be headed.”—BookPage (starred)
“It's been nine years since we had a new Karen Joy Fowler novel. . . . It's definitely one we deserve…She weaves an intimate, engaging portrait of a tribe whose aims and alliances were always shifting, buffeted by tragedy (several beloved siblings died young) and fickle fortunes.”—Entertainment Weekly
“Fowler presents an omniscient, bird’s-eye view of these lives, along with a nod to what could be apocryphal. The result is an engrossing portrayal of a nineteenth-century family living through the U.S.’ most turbulent era.”—Booklist
“Booth is a sad, astonishing, and beautifully written look at a complicated, secretive family that failed to save one of their own from himself. Highly recommended.”—Historical Novels Review
“An epic novel, it’s both the story of an eccentric household and historical saga zooming in on the tumultuous lives of each family member as the country catapults into civil war.” —Real Simple
“Masterful…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
“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
“Exquisite… The actors have long left the stage, Fowler notes, but the ghosts remain, still haunting us today.” — The Washington Post
“Fowler unfurls the Booths’ tumultuous, theatrical lives against the backdrop of an unruly America, mired in the brutal violence of the Civil War, in this troubling, nuanced, engrossing novel.” — The Daily Mail
“Fowler’s story unfolds against a backdrop of escalating national tension; she captures with enthralling vividness a country caught in the grip of fanatical populism, ripped apart by irreconcilable political differences and boiling with fury and rage. Her greater achievement, though, is to breathe life into this turbulent, eccentric, bohemian family, investing each of its members with an intense, and intensely affecting, humanity…The result is an unalloyed triumph. Like Hilary Mantel in her Wolf Hall trilogy, Fowler skillfully exploits the present tense to remake the past as something surprising and new.” — The Literary Review
“It's an epic story that captures the unstable passions that disrupt the Booth family and the disagreements that set the nation on fire.” —Ron Charles, CBS Sunday Morning
“Slow-burning and rich, it illuminates America’s core contradictions.” — People Magazine

Karen Joy Fowler is the New York Times bestselling author of seven novels and three short story collections. Her 2004 novel, The Jane Austen Book Club, spent thirteen weeks on the New York Times bestsellers list and was a New York Times Notable Book. Fowler’s previous novel, Sister Noon, was a finalist for the 2001 PEN/Faulkner Award for fiction. Her debut novel, Sarah Canary, won the Commonwealth medal for best first novel by a Californian, was listed for the Irish Times International Fiction Prize as well as the Bay Area Book Reviewers Prize, and was a New York Times Notable Book. Fowler’s short story collection Black Glass won the World Fantasy Award in 1999, and her collection What I Didn’t See won the World Fantasy Award in 2011. Her most recent novel We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, won the 2014 PEN/Faulkner Award for fiction and was short-listed for the 2014 Man Booker Prize. Her new novel Booth published in March 2022 and was long-listed for the 2022 Booker Prize.

She is the co-founder of the Otherwise Award and the current president of the Clarion Foundation (also known as Clarion San Diego). Fowler and her husband, who have two grown children and seven grandchildren, live in Santa Cruz, California. Fowler also supports a chimp named Caesar who lives at the Tacugama Chimpanzee Sanctuary in Sierra Leone.

“No contemporary writer creates characters more appealing, or examines them with greater acuity and forgiveness, than she does.”

—Michael Chabon, Pulitzer Prize-winning author

“What strikes one first is the voice: robust, sly, witty, elegant, unexpected and never boring. Here is a novelist who absolutely comprehends the pleasures of imagination and transformation.”

—Margot Livesey, The New York Times Book Review

“An astonishing narrative voice, at once lyric and ironic, satiric and nostalgic…Fowler can tell stories that engage and enchant.”

—San Francisco Chronicle

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