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.

The story of John Wilkes Booth and his family is both incredible and stunning, so Fowler's choice to center a novel around it was a smart one. All of us repeatedly commented about how little we actually knew about Lincoln's assassination in terms of the political climate at the time, the fame of the assassin's family (we commented that it was akin to a Baldwin sibling killing the president today), and how extensive the plot actually was. In that spirit, no one of us disliked the novel. Everyone found the view on history both timely and moving, and there were storylines that we universally adored. The main issue we had was with the length of the book and all the different stories it contained. Fowler takes us on a long history of the Booth family, looking at the development and life choices of all of the siblings, interspersed with very short passages on Lincoln's doings in the same time periods. While some of us thought this was all necessary context to understanding who the Booths were, some of us felt the sibling stories were extraneous and that the tangents were both pointless and ill handled. If we were going to get so little on Lincoln, why include it at all? Why so much time on Rosalie if we're never really going to get insight into her? The critics of the book felt it was a lot of time spent on peripheral characters if the heart of the novel was the assassination and that the whole novel would have been better if it were much shorter. The novel's defenders argued that all of this was important to situate you in mindset of the time -- both to make you realize how important the Booths were as celebrities and to have you realize how deep and pervasive the questions about slavery and civil war actually were. Edwin's story was particularly brilliant. All of us thought his arc from his dark time as a child with his father to his final moment on stage were vivid and powerful, and the contrast with John's descent into fanaticism worked well. No one could fault the end of the book as it walked through the assassination and the aftermath. Likeability of the characters was a contentious point, where some people had sympathy for Asia and Joseph while others found them insufferable, but again whether this worked or not depended on how much you thought these secondary characters were necessary to building the world. Fowler's tone was also something we debated. Fowler takes a perspective from after all the events of the novel, and she sometimes refers to the future when she looks at moments in the character's lives, commenting that it's the last time someone will do something or making reference to events beyond the character's life. We debated the value of that -- a lot of it was a taste issue about whether you read the narrator as patronizing or poignant. That said, all of us had a positive take on the book and most of us would recommend it. Fowler just made a good decision to look at a historic moment with similar political and familial strife as our own and dramatize in a way that made it compelling and humanizing. Whether you like the book or love it will depend on how much the story of the Booths compels you beyond its final act.