Serpent's Tail bags 'another masterpiece' by Karen Joy Fowler

Serpent’s Tail is to publish Booth, Karen Joy Fowler’s first novel since the Booker-shortlisted We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves.

Rebecca Gray, associate publisher, acquired the novel from Molly Friedrich and Lucy Carson at the Friedrich Agency, alongside co-agent Anthony Goff at David Higham Associates.

Described as "magisterial, vivid and tragic", Booth follows the trajectory of John Wilkes Booth, the man who assassinated President Abraham Lincoln, and tells the story of a family who changed the course of American history. The synopsis explains: "Junius is a famous and charismatic English actor, and self-styled rival to Edmund Kean who thrills America with his renditions of Shakespeare, when he isn’t drunk and sinking the family ever further into debt. Growing up in 19th-century rural Maryland, his children become intimately familiar with hardship, early death and the horrors of slavery. Of the six Booth siblings who survive to adulthood, each one has their own dreams they must fight to realise—but it is Johnny who makes the terrible decision that will ensure their names are known to this day."

Putnam (an imprint of PRH) will publish the novel in the US in March 2022, and Serpent’s Tail will publish simultaneously with an £18.99 hardback and export trade paperback, audio and e-book editions. Serpent’s Tail will also be reissuing We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves in a new summer paperback edition on 1st July.

Fowler is the author of seven previous novels including The Jane Austen Book Club and three short story collections. Her most recent novel, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2014, won the PEN/Faulkner Prize 2014 and has sold over a million copies globally. She has sold 687,735 books for £3.8m via Nielsen Bookscan in the UK, with The Jane Austen Book Club her biggest seller, at 328,291 copies sold in paperback.

Commenting on the new novel, she said: "I'm thrilled to be working again with the wonderful team at Serpent's Tail. They've been very patient as this book was a long time coming—current events continually drawing my attention away from historical ones. But those long ago issues remain relevant and the Booths proved a particularly useful lens through which to tell a story about family, fame, and the Civil War. Plus lots of Shakespeare."

Gray added: "How do you follow up the book of a lifetime? For Karen, the answer is by writing another masterpiece. This is an utterly different book to We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, but it’s just as imaginative, thought-provoking and resonant. It takes a story we think we know and turns it inside out, creating a novel that is historically and politically serious, and an absolute pleasure to read, too. The characters feel alive on the page, the setting is beautifully done, and once again Karen finds a voice that rises off the page. This is a deep dive into history that shows how Britain and the US have intertwined stories, and how the past casts long shadows into the present. When I began reading the book I wondered if it was her Wolf Hall, and by the end I knew that it was."