First published 2022
Junius Booth commands the stage as a celebrated Shakespearean actor, but at home on their remote Baltimore farmstead in the 1830s, his children know him as an unstable patriarch who fled bigamy charges in England. His wife raises six surviving children while America slides toward civil war. Each Booth sibling harbors personal ambitions. They are performers and dreamers, shaped by their father's theatrical brilliance and dangerous unpredictability. As the nation fractures over secession, the family fractures too. Johnny Booth grows into the son who will commit the most notorious political murder in American history. This is the story of how a family of charmers and liars produced the man who killed Abraham Lincoln. The bonds that hold the Booths together ultimately cannot prevent the choice that tears them apart forever.
Genres: american-fiction, biographical-fiction, 19th-century, american-history
Vibes: intimate, suspenseful, thought-provoking
Tropes: family-drama, unreliable-narrator
Setting: Baltimore, England
Period: 1830s, Civil War
480 pages · Paperback · FABER AND FABER