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Mohrbooks Literary Agency
Sebastian Ritscher
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English
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BOOTH

Karen Joy Fowler

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 16 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.

Karen Joy Fowler is the New York Times bestselling author of six 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.
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Published 2022-03-08 by Putnam

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Karen Joy Fowler's novel BOOTH has been longlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize! Read more...

Veteran author Karen Joy Fowler has taken on the challenge of understanding the family behind one of America's most infamous actors: John Wilkes Booth. After years of living a much private life, the Booths emerged from the shadows to become one of the leading theatrical families during the 1800s. Though, after one sibling reaches his boiling point, the entire family's reputation is tarnished as they are left to reckon with the truth. Read more...

Wonderful profile of the author that ran in this week's Publishers Weekly Read more...

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.

Razor-sharp... Fowler sets the stage in remarkable prose... The nuanced plot is both historically rigorous and richly imagined. This is a winner. Read more...

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.

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

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. Read more...

Slow-burning and rich, it illuminates America's core contradictions.

BOOTH is one of Entertainment Weekly's Most Anticipated Books of 2022 Kirkus Reviews' Most Anticipated Books of 2022 Virginia Living's Most Anticipated Books 2022 Medium's Most Exciting Book Releases of 2022 Veranda's Most Anticipated Books of 2022 Entertainment Weekly's 20 most anticipated books of 2022 Real Simple's Best Books of 2022

One could write an old-fashioned horror novel, but an even better way to terrify modern readers is to show them the parallels between a gut-wrenching period of American history and today, as Karen Joy Fowler does in Booth. Read more...

UK: Serpent's Tail ; Dutch: Nieuw Amsterdam

exquisite... The actors have long left the stage, Fowler notes, but the ghosts remain, still haunting us today. Read more...

Solid research mixed with empathetic imagination enriches Booth. Read more...

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. Read more...

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.

Cover reveal and article Read more...

It's been nine years since we had a new Karen Joy Fowler novel... It's definitely one we deserve.

Q&A with Karen Joy Fowler Read more...

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.

The historical context she offers is of a preCivil 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. Read more...

An Interview with Karen Joy Fowler, author of BOOTH Read more...

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. Read more...

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.

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.

It's been nine years since we had a new Karen Joy Fowler novel, and while this might not be the book we were expecting, it's definitely one we deserve. Read more...

The 2014 Booker nominee on her new novel about the family of Abraham Lincoln's assassin, the 'horrible secret' of her sci-fi writing and her long period of despair Read more...