Best Book of the Year Real Simple • AARP • USA Today • NPR • Virginia LivingLonglisted for the
2022 Booker PrizeFrom 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.
