Historical facts are one thing. And knowing what happened and why it happened is essential in a culture where our grasp of civic history is diminishing.

But historical fiction takes us inside the event and into the perceptions of characters to understand what it meant to live through it.  

So this month, I’m pairing two books each week that bring us up close and personal with history.

I’ve just finished Karen Joy Fowler’s novel, “Booth” and it is an anguished portrait of the people around the man who assassinated Abraham Lincoln. 

Indeed, Fowler specifies in her author’s note that the novel is not about John Wilkes Booth. “I did not want to write a book about John Wilkes,” she says. “This is a man who craved attention and has gotten too much of it…”

Instead, she’s writing about how domineering parents and the deaths of siblings and an innate narcissism propel John Wilkes Booth to that theater box on April 15, 1865.

What was it like to be in the Ford's Theatre - in the very same box as the Lincoln's the night the president was assassinated?  

Historian and novelist Thomas Mallon puts a young couple -- Henry and Clara -- there, real people about whom little is known.

Henry Rathbone and Clara Harris were step-siblings, brought together when Henry’s mother married Clara’s father. They fell in love and despite resistance from their parents, were engaged to be married.

Mary Todd Lincoln knew Clara and invited the young couple  to the play. We see the assassination through Clara’s eyes and then the story spins away into the desperation, chaos and romantic disappointment that followed.

Mallon is one of my favorite historical fiction writers. If you missed “Watergate," put that on your list too. 

— Kerri Miller | MPR News