The Booth family tombstone in Green Mount Cemetery, Baltimore, is, as Karen Joy Fowler describes it in this epic novel about the distinguished 19th-century American theatrical clan, “a marble obelisk … almost twenty feet high”. Like that obelisk, the Booth name still casts a long shadow over the US landscape: today we remember the family chiefly because one of its sons, John Wilkes Booth, was the assassin of Abraham Lincoln.
Everyone knows the story. It’s 14 April 1865. The civil war is effectively over, and Lincoln is at the theatre, watching a play, when a man enters his box, pulls out a pistol and shoots him in the head. Lincoln dies the following morning. Booth goes on the run but is hunted down and killed 13 days later. The nation is plunged into despair; this presidential death – the first such assassination in US history – will leave a lasting scar.
