![]() ![]() ![]() Their 10 children are born in near penury on a remote farm in rural Maryland. The Booth family story begins with Junius Brutus Booth, the celebrated Shakespearean actor, who flees charges of bigamy in England in 1821 with Mary Ann Holmes, a Drury Lane flower seller (no spoilers here: we’re in the realm of history). That book, which has a narrative shock in store for the reader partway through, probes familial bonds and the nature of love in an “ordinary” American nuclear family. This isn’t Fowler’s first try at capturing the fraught dynamics of the family, of course: it follows 2013’s We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, her novel about an extraordinary experiment in adoption. ![]() She handles it adroitly, interweaving Booth’s story with that of his parents and siblings, a tale that’s colourful and tragic enough in its own right. How to deal with the narrative problem of John Wilkes and this inevitable climax is (as Fowler acknowledges in the author’s note) there on nearly every page. What’s past is prologue: the rest of the novel both is, and isn’t, a build-up to that moment. ![]()
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