“Sic semper tyrannis!” John Wilkes Booth is said to have yelled when he shot Abraham Lincoln in 1865, proof if nothing else that while America’s spirit of murderous insurgency has barely diminished since the American Civil War, the literacy levels of those keeping it burning certainly have.

Karen Joy Fowler’s vividly realised fictional biography of America’s famous Booth family reminds us that John Wilkes was not the first to make their name notorious. His father Junius and brother Edwin, as celebrated, if not always sober, Shakespearean actors, got there long before him. (One of the affecting aspects of Fowler’s novel is the way it demonstrates the centrality of Shakespeare to 19th-century American life.) 

There were also two sisters, Rosalie, who was plain, and Asia, who was not, an older brother June and younger brother Joe, and their long-suffering mother, an English beauty who may or may not have been aware Junius already had a wife when she ran away with him at the age of 17. Junius was a genius and a drunk, prone in equal parts to incandescent performances and “mad freaks”, who lived on a Maryland farm but was devoutly vegetarian, who would hold a funeral for a pigeon but once tried to kill a man with a poker, believing either himself or the victim to be Iago, it’s not clear which.

Fowler, a born storyteller, whose last novel We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves was shortlisted for the 2014 Booker Prize, relishes the extraordinary theatre of their lives in this rambunctious elision of authorial imagination and impeccably researched fact. This is her third novel to be set in 19th-century America and, beyond a family revolving precariously around “the fixed point” of a father’s capricious talent, it maps out a country convulsively edging towards abolition. As Abraham Lincoln moves closer to the White House and tensions build between North and South, readers not already conversant with events like the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, a lightning rod moment in the lead-up to the Civil War, might find themselves learning quite a bit. 

Meanwhile, the Booths – whom Fowler presents as the sort of liberal-leaning, slave-leasing family one can imagine saying “some of our best friends are slaves” – offer their own conflicted microcosm of a country riven with competing ideas about the Union and the Constitution, where the question of slavery is either moral or existential. It’s one of the novel’s great strengths that Fowler doesn’t seek to explain John Wilkes – a charismatic son who admires the abolitionist John Brown for his principles, yet is horrified by the killing of slave owner Edward Gorsuch during a slave uprising – but rather humanises him in ways that neither invite sympathy nor (for much of the book) condemnation.

Fowler tells her tale in an emphatic present tense, as though the reader were right in the room as it all happens. Her detailed descriptions of everyday incident pulse with life. Yet at nearly 500 pages, there is an awful lot of detail and an awful lot of incident. She breathes rich imaginative colour into her characters – one’s heart snags for poor, stay-at-home Rosalie who, in her 30s, starts slipping gin into her morning tea – but largely organises her material according to the principles of biography rather than plot, meaning there is the vaguest impression of her novel consisting, until its pivotal denouement, of one damn thing after another.

She is also the most performative of narrators, directing our gaze with the declamatory flourish of a 19th-century actor. She is just about good enough a writer to get away with this, and of course it suits her aesthetic design: the novel niggles away at the idea that Wilkes, a frustrated actor, his upbringing shaped by performance, entitlement and hubristic feelings of destiny, assassinated Lincoln partly out of some grandiose Shakespeare complex.

The reader is spoilt for choice in this effortlessly resonant novel for gleaming takeaway quotations from history, but with American democracy itself imperilled by recent events, for my money Lincoln in this instance beats Shakespeare. Should a dictator ever try to stretch the Republic to its limits, he warned in 1838, “it will require the people to be united with each other, attached to the government and laws… to successfully frustrate his designs”.

Booth is published by Serpent’s Tail at £18.99. To order your copy for £16.99 call 0844 871 1514 or visit the Telegraph Bookshop