Scala Radio Book Club: Booth by Karen Joy Fowler
A brand new novel by the award-winning author of We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves
Last updated 17th Aug 2022
In the Scala Radio Book Club this week (Thursday 10th March), Mark Forrest chatted to American author Karen Joy Fowler, on her brand-new novel Booth.
From the award-winning author of We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, Booth delivers a mesmerising nineteenth-century saga of a thespian family whose six siblings come to adulthood in the shadow of the American Civil War.
Booth tells the story of the brilliant and disastrously ill-fated Booth family. Junius is the patriarch, a celebrated Shakespearean actor who fled bigamy charges in England, both a mesmerising talent and a man of terrifying instability. As his children grow up in a remote farmstead in 1820s rural Baltimore, the country draws ever closer to the boiling point of secession and civil war.
Of the six Booth siblings who survive to adulthood, each has their own dreams they must fight to realise - but it is Johnny who makes the terrible decision that will change the course of history - the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.
Booth is a riveting novel focused on the very things that bind, and break, a family.
Mark began the interview asking, ‘How difficult was it for you to write about the Booth family, without doing what so many have done in the past, and glorifying John Wilkes Booth for what he did?’
‘I went into the book with a very clear purpose regarding John Wilkes Booth, which was that I thought that this was a man who over the years had wanted attention, and had gotten it, and did not deserve it,’ said Karen.
‘The questions that I went into the book with involved his brothers and sisters. What would it be like to be the brother and sister of a man who, at the end of his life, was considered a monster? What would it be like to continue to love him? How would you manage to continue to love him? You know, were the other Booth children in sympathy with his politics, which as I found out, they were not. He was very much an outlier with his political opinions.’
Mark then turned his attention to American politics today. ‘Many say that America is more divided now than ever. How does 2022 compare with the division that you write about that started the Civil War, and eventually led to that assassination of Lincoln?’
‘It's alarmingly similar,’ said Karen. ‘I felt the more I researched this period, and the more I worked on the book, and the more events in the US continued to unfold, the clearer the parallels became. One of the hallmarks of the Civil War was a kind of brother against brother divisions inside families, and the Booth family certainly represents that. This is also something we are seeing now. On social media, many people are posting about how family members are going down the rabbit hole of conspiracies, and their relatives can't reach them anymore.’
Mark asked, ‘In what way did your life change after your nomination for the Booker Prize in 2014?’
‘Everything changed! It just catapulted me into a completely different place. I'm so grateful. I was so lucky because it was the first year Americans could be considered. If the book had been published a year earlier, it wouldn't have happened,’ said Karen.
Mark ended the interview by asking, ‘You've done all sorts of genre-shifting with each new release, what's laying behind your decisions when you come to write your next novel?’
‘I identify much more strongly as a reader than I do as a writer. I love books and I love books from every shelf in the library. There's no genre that doesn't contain work that I think is wonderful and pleasurable. My output reflects the reading I do, which is all over the map, but also that just as a personality trait, I get bored easily!’
Find out about more Scala Radio Book Club guests here >>
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Booth by Karen Joy Fowler
Nominated for the 2022 Booker Prize, Booth is the latest novel from the award-winning author of We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves.
Booth delivers a mesmerising nineteenth-century saga of a thespian family whose six siblings come to adulthood in the shadow of the American Civil War.
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