From the Booker-shortlisted, million-copy bestselling author of We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves comes an epic novel about the infamous, ill-fated Booth family. Charmers, liars, drinkers and dreamers, they will change history forever.

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 1830s 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.

'Wise, provocative and wildly endearing' Guardian 'Readably juicy and surreptitiously smart' Barbara Kingsolver THE MILLION-COPY BESTSELLER Rosemary doesn't talk much, and about certain things she's silent. She had a sister, Fern, her whirlwind other half, who vanished from her life in circumstances she wishes she could forget. And it's been ten years since she last saw her beloved older brother Lowell. Now at college, Rosemary starts to see she can't go forward without going back to the time when aged five, she was sent away from home to her grandparents and returned to find Fern gone. It was Rosemary's parents who began all of the trouble - isn't it always? But, dear reader, exactly how they did it is a twist you'll have to discover for yourself.

LONGLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 2022 AND A SUNDAY TIMES HISTORICAL NOVEL OF THE YEAR 2022.

In 1822, a stage is set: Englishman Junius Booth - celebrated Shakespearean actor and man of mesmerising charm and instability - moves to a remote cabin outside Baltimore with his wife, who bears him ten children. Of the six who survive infancy, one is John Wilkes - the hot-tempered but much-loved middle son who, in 1865, fatally shoots Abraham Lincoln in a Washington theatre, changing the course of history.

What makes a murderer? His family or the world? And how can those who love him ever come to terms with his actions?

Strikingly relevant to the world today, Booth is the story of one extraordinary family and the terrible act that shattered their bonds forever.

"A gripping, bighearted book." --Khaled Hosseini
Winner of the 2014 PEN/Faulkner Award
One of the "New York Times Book Review's "100 Notable Books of 2013 and named by "The Christian Science Monitor "as one of the top 15 works of fiction
The "New York Times" bestselling author of "The Jane Austen Book Club" introduces a middle-class American family, ordinary in every way but one.
Meet the Cooke family: Mother and Dad, brother Lowell, sister Fern, and Rosemary, who begins her story in the middle. She has her reasons. "I was raised with a chimpanzee," she explains. "I tell you Fern was a chimp and already you aren't thinking of her as my sister. But until Fern's expulsion ... she was my twin, my funhouse mirror, my whirlwind other half and I loved her as a sister." As a child, Rosemary never stopped talking. Then, something happened, and Rosemary wrapped herself in silence.
In "We Are All Completely beside Ourselves, " Karen Joy Fowler weaves her most accomplished work to date--a tale of loving but fallible people whose well-intentioned actions lead to heartbreaking consequences.

Welcome to the Best of the Masterworks: A selection of the finest in science fiction - Black-cloaked Sarah Canary is the ugliest woman Chin Ah Kin could ever imagine. But after she wanders into a railway camp in the Washington territories in 1873, Chin is ordered by his uncle to escort her away. Far away. What should be simple journey quickly escalates beyond Chin's control, into a series of adventures and misadventures that are at once hilarious, deeply moving, and downright terrifying. Who - or what - is the mysterious Sarah Canary? And why can't Chin leave her, even for his own good? Co-founder of the James Tiptree Jr. Award, Karen Joy Fowler is a multi-award-winning novelist. Her accolades include three World Fantasy Awards and two Nebula awards. Sarah Canary was her debut novel in 1991, and it was nominated for the Nebula, Locus and James Tiptree Jr. awards, winning the California Book Award Silver Medal. - 'A picaresque romp that takes a good, long look into the human heart, this is a stunning debut' - Publishers Weekly 'The characters and the theme shine' - LA Times 'Powerfully imagined . . . Here is a work that manages to be at the same time (and often in the same sentence) dark and deep and fun' - The Washington Post Book World

LONGLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 2022 A SUNDAY TIMES HISTORICAL NOVEL OF THE YEAR 2022 A TELEGRAPH BEST FICTION BOOK OF THE YEAR 2022 A WATERSTONES BEST HISTORICAL NOVEL OF THE YEAR 2022 AN EVENING STADARD MUST-READ NOVEL OF THE YEAR 2022 AS HEARD ON BBC RADIO 4 OPEN BOOK 'Accomplished, immersive and profoundly satisfying' Cathy Rentzenbrink 'Effortlessly resonant ... breathes rich imaginative colour in her characters' Daily Telegraph From the million-copy bestselling author of We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves comes an epic novel about the infamous, ill-fated Booth family. SIX BROTHERS AND SISTERS. ONE INJUSTICE THAT WILL SHATTER THEIR BOND FOREVER. 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 1830s 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. 'In its stretch and imaginative depth, Booth has an utterly seductive authority' Guardian 'Karen Joy Fowler's novels are wildly inventive and deservedly popular' Daily Mail 'Booth is a triumph!' Ruth Ozeki 'Captures with enthralling vividness a country caught in the grip of fanatical populism, ripped apart by irreconcilable political differences and boiling with fury and rage ... An unalloyed triumph' Literary Review 'Brilliantly recounts the story of the American theatrical dynasty that produced Lincoln's assassin' Sunday Times Book of the Month 'Her finest, most beautiful novel to date' Neel Mukherjee

The Extraordinary "New York Times" Bestseller

In Californiaas central valley, five women and one man join to discuss Jane Austenas novels. Over the six months they get together, marriages are tested, affairs begin, unsuitable arrangements become suitable, and love happens. With her eye for the frailties of human behavior and her ear for the absurdities of social intercourse, Karen Joy Fowler has never been wittier nor her characters more appealing. The result is a delicious dissection of modern relationships.

Dedicated Austenites will delight in unearthing the echoes of Austen that run through the novel, but most readers will simply enjoy the vision and voice that, despite two centuries of separation, unite two great writers of brilliant social comedy.
aThis exquisite novel is bigger and more ambitious than it appearsa] Fowleras shrewdest, funniest fiction yet, a novel about how we engage with a novel. You donat have to be a student of Jane Austen to enjoy it, either. . . Lovers of Austen will relish this book, but I envy any reader who comes to it unfamiliar with her. Thereas no better introduction.a
aPatrick T. OaConnor, "The New York Times Book Review"
aKaren Joy Fowler creates a novel that is so winning, so touching, so delicately, slyly witty that admirers of Persuasion and Emma will simply sigh with happiness.a
aMichael Dirda, "The Washington Post Book World"
aStart quoting a few of Fowleras puckish lines and it becomes damnably difficult to stop. . . "The Jane Austen Book Club" amounts to a witty meditation on how the books we choose, choose us too.a
aDavid Kipen, "San Francisco Chronicle"
a"The Jane Austen Book Club" offers a sparkling rumination on the act of reading itself and how beloved books can serve as refuge, self-definition, snobbish barricades against other people or pathways out of the old self to a wider world. [It is] a terrific comic novel about a closed society merrily transforming itself by reading.a
aMaureen Corrigan, NPRas "All Things Considered"
[Fowler] does so terrific a job of bringing her characters to life that Austenas work falls away like a husk. Itas an impressive feat of homage, since Fowler essentially borrows Austenas great themesa]and makes them her own. Miss Austen would be proud.a
aJohn Freeman, "The Denver Post"

Shirley Jackson Awards shortlist
Locus Award shortlist
Story Prize Notable Books
Frank O'Connor Award longlist

"Beautifully written and subtly discomforting stories."--Nancy Pearl

"An exceptionally versatile author."--"St. Louis Post-Dispatch"

In her moving and elegant new collection, "New York Times" bestseller Karen Joy Fowler writes about John Wilkes Booth's younger brother, a one-winged man, a California cult, and a pair of twins, and she digs into our past, present, and future in the quiet, witty, and incisive way only she can.

The sinister and the magical are always lurking just below the surface: for a mother who invents a fairy-tale world for her son in "Halfway People"; for Edwin Booth in "Booth's Ghost," haunted by his fame as "America's Hamlet" and his brother's terrible actions; for Norah, a rebellious teenager facing torture in the World Fantasy and Shirley Jackson Award winner "The Pelican Bar" as she confronts Mama Strong, the sadistic boss of a rehabilitation facility; for the narrator recounting her descent in "What I Didn't See."

With clear and insightful prose, Fowler's stories measure the human capacities for hope and despair, brutality and kindness. This collection, which includes two Nebula Award winners and some stories which have been significantly rewritten since first publication, is sure to delight readers, even as it pulls the rug out from underneath them.

Karen Joy Fowler is the author of five novels, including "Wit's End," "Sister Noon," "Sarah Canary," and "The New York Times" bestseller "The Jane Austen Book Club." Fowler and her husband, who have two grown children, live in Santa Cruz, California.

Now in Penguin Classics?a treasure trove of Jane Austen's novels
Few novelists have conveyed the subtleties and nuances of their own social milieu with the wit and insight of Jane Austen. Here in one volume are her seven great novels: "Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, Emma, Northanger Abbey, Persuasion," and "Lady Susan." Through her vivacious and spirited heroines and their circle, Austen vividly portrays English middle-class life as the eighteenth century came to a close and the nineteenth century began. Each of the novels is a love story and a story about marriage?marriage for love, for financial security, for social status. But they are not romances; ironic, comic, and wise, they are masterly evocations of the society Jane Austen observed. This beautiful volume covers the literary career of one of England's finest prose stylists of any century.
?These modern editions are to be strongly recommended.?
?Brian Southam, The Jane Austen Society

Karen Joy Fowler has taken a new turn with this collection of short stories. 'The Science of Herself' is at once perceptive, entertaining, thought-provoking and often hilarious, and each story is told with a progressive and feminist edge.

" A] delightful and eccentric new tale"("The Boston Globe") from the author of the runaway bestseller "The Jane Austen Book Club"
In Karen Joy Fowler's newest novel, the bestselling author of "The Jane Austen Book Club" once again delivers top-notch storytelling, creating characters both oddball and endearing in a voice that is utterly and memorably her own. "Wit's End" is a clever, playful novel about finally allowing oneself to grow up-with a dash of mystery thrown in.
At loose ends and weary from her recent losses-the deaths of an inventive if at times irritating father and her beloved brother-Rima Lansill comes to Wit's End, the home of her legendary godmother, bestselling mystery writer Addison Early, to regroup...and in search of answers. For starters, why did Addison name one of her characters-a murderer-after Rima's father? But Addison is secretive and feisty, so consumed with protecting her famous fictional detective, Maxwell Lane, from the vagaries of the Internet that-rumor has it- she has writer's block. As one woman searches for truth, the other struggles to control the reality of her fiction.
Rima soon becomes enmeshed in Addison's household of eccentrics: a formerly alcoholic cook and her irksome son, two quirky dog-walkers, a mysterious stalker, the tiny characters that populate Addison's dollhouse crime-scene replicas, and even Maxwell Lane himself. But, wrapped up in a mystery that may or may not be of her own creation, Rima discovers to her surprise that the ultimate solution to this puzzle is the new family she has found at the house called Wit's End.
Playfully exploring the blurred boundaries between reality and virtual reality, fiction and fact, Karen Joy Fowler subverts the whodunit and gives us a thoroughly modern meta-mystery with wit, warmth, and heart.

When black cloaked Sarah Canary wanders into a railway camp in the Washington territories in 1873, Chin Ah Kin is ordered by his uncle to escort "the ugliest woman he could imagine" away. Far away. But Chin soon becomes the follower. In the first of many such instances, they are separated, both resurfacing some days later at an insane asylum. Chin has run afoul of the law and Sarah has been committed for observation. Their escape from the asylum in the company of another inmate sets into motion a series of adventures and misadventures that are at once hilarious, deeply moving, and downright terrifying.

Six people five women and a man meet once a month in California's Central Valley to discuss Jane Austen's novels. They are ordinary people, neither happy nor unhappy, but each of them is wounded in different ways, they are all mixed up about their lives and relationships. Over the six months they meet, marriages are tested, affairs begin, unsuitable arrangements become suitable under the guiding eye of Jane Austen a couple of them even fall in love 'A thoroughly delightful comedy of contemporary manners' Entertainment Weekly