All Our Yesterdays

A Novel of Lady Macbeth

By: Joel H. Morris

Narrated by: Angus King, Ell Potter

A USA Today Bestseller!

A propulsive and piercing debut, set ten years before the events of Shakespeare’s historic play, about the ambition, power, and fate that define one of literature’s most notorious figures: Lady Macbeth.

Scotland, the 11th Century. Born in a noble household and granddaughter of a forgotten Scottish king, a young girl carries the guilt of her mother’s death and the weight of an unknowable prophecy. When she is married, at fifteen, to the Mormaer of Moray, she experiences firsthand the violence of a sadistic husband and a kingdom constantly at war. To survive with her young son in a superstitious realm, she must rely on her own cunning and wit, especially when her husband’s downfall inadvertently sets them free.

Suspicious of the dark devices that may have led to his father’s death, her son watches as his mother falls in love with the enigmatic thane Macbeth. Now a woman of stature, Lady Macbeth confronts a world of masculine power and secures the protection of her family. But the coronation of King Duncan and the political maneuvering of her cousin Macduff set her on a tragic course, one where her own success might mean embracing the very curse that haunts her and risking the child she loves.©2024 Joel H. Morris (P)2024 Penguin Audio

Critic reviews

“Lady Macbeth is surely one of our most instantly recognizable characters, a shorthand now for heartless and overweening ambition. In All Our Yesterdays, Morris has given her the deep, nuanced, and complicated backstory she deserves. With witches! Thoroughly engrossing, highly recommended.” –Karen Joy Fowler, author of Booth and We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

“Hail, Macbeth! A stunning meditation on the auspiciousness of silence, and intergenerational anguish. The evolution of Shakespeare’s Medea is a marvel to behold by Morris’s pen. I could not put this book down.” –Isa Arsén, author of Shoot the Moon

“As sharp and cutting as an obsidian dagger, Joel H. Morris’s All Our Yesterdays dives deep into Lady Macbeth’s backstory, replacing desire with fear, calculation with grief, and loss, not ambition, as the spark that ignites her bloody journey. You’ll never read Shakespeare’s play the same way again.” –Liz Michalski, author of Darling Girl

Beautifully Crafted Portrait of The Lady

I loved this novel, which traverses the era preceding King Duncan’s fateful visit. It’s beautifully crafted; wrapping us into the mind’s eye of alternating narrators, Lady Macbeth and her son, and offering nuanced portraits of both woman and son enduring brutish times and fateful prophecies. It’s hard to conjure an empathetic portrayal of a character so vilified in literature, and explore questions that transcend time and place about fate and loss with such a deeply satisfying psychological elegy, but here it is. We see, through time, how minor choices amass into major tragedy. Although the audio version doesn’t entirely land the subtle, understated cadence of the written text — I found it over dramatic in spots — it’s still a good venue. Familiarity with Shakespeare’s Macbeth isn’t essential; this leads right up to the castle gates, but it does lend gravitas to the tale. Any readers of historical genres — authors like Madeline Miller and Alison Weir come to mind — will also find it enlightening and compelling.

excellent read and performance

I was eager to read this novel as it covers points in Scottish history that I am not as familiar with as background of the story. It also gives the back story of Lady Macbeth and the events prior to Shakespeare's Macbeth. I will admit to not being well educated in Shakespeare's works but I deeply appreciated the mother and child story. How the winds of destiny pulled the strands of these lives. I also loved the hints of supernatural influences, because I know that these were contemporary spiritual influences.

The performance by both the narrators is solid. The brogue isn't distracting and lends to the locale and time frame.