Geraldine Brooks is the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel
March and the international bestsellers
The Secret Chord,
Caleb's Crossing,
People of the Book, and
Year of Wonders. She has also written the acclaimed nonfiction works
Nine Parts of Desire and
Foreign Correspondence. Born and raised in Australia, Brooks lives in Massachusetts.
Horse is an extraordinary novel of race, war and idealism. It is set partly in pre-Civil War Kentucky, partly in the New York of the 1950s. The story of Lexington, the fastest horse in nineteenth-century America, his black groom, and the white abolitionist who painted him is counterpointed with that of the woman who went on to own the horse's famous painting. Martha Jackson is at the centre of post World War 2's New York art scene, and the social and sexual turbulence of the 1950s. The collision of these two stories takes Geraldine Brooks's fans back to the brilliance of her Pulitzer-Prize winning
March, and is her finest novel yet.
A discarded painting in a junk pile, a skeleton in an attic, and the greatest racehorse in American history: from these strands, a Pulitzer Prize winner tells a sweeping story of spirit, obsession, and injustice across American history
Kentucky, 1850. An enslaved groom named Jarret and a bay foal forge a bond of understanding that will carry the horse to record-setting victories across the South. When the nation erupts in civil war, an itinerant young artist who has made his name on paintings of the racehorse takes up arms for the Union. On a perilous night, he reunites with the stallion and his groom, very far from the glamour of any racetrack.
New York City, 1954. Martha Jackson, a gallery owner celebrated for taking risks on edgy contemporary painters, becomes obsessed with a 19th equestrian oil painting of mysterious provenance.
Washington, DC, 2019. Jess, a Smithsonian scientist from Australia, and Theo, a Nigerian-American art historian, find themselves unexpectedly connected through their shared interest in the horse-one studying the stallion's bones for clues to his power and endurance, the other uncovering the lost history of the unsung Black horsemen who were critical to his racing success.
Based on the remarkable true story of the record-breaking thoroughbred, Lexington, who became America's greatest stud sire, Horse is an original ,gripping, multi-layered reckoning with the legacy of enslavement and racism in America.
An action-packed new novel from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of People of the Book and March.Everyone should read Geraldine BrooksThere's something bordering on the supernatural about Geraldine Brooks. She seems able to transport herself back to earlier time periods, to time travel. Sometimes, reading her work, she draws you so thoroughly into another era that you swear she's actually lived in it.Brook is a master at bringing the past alive . . . in [her] skillful hands the issues of the past echo our own deepest concerns: love and loss, drama and tragedy, chaos and brutality.One of our most supple and insightful novelists . . . Brooks is as adventurous as a novelist as she once was a journalist . . . her journalistic sense of story has remained vibrant.Few fiction writers travel across territory as vast as that staked out by the intrepid Geraldine Brooks . . . There's a romance between Brooks and the world, and her writing is as full of heart and curiosity as it is intelligence and judgement . . . her appetite for detail, her wanting to know how things work and why they happened, is enormous.I loved this book so much - an important book, gorgeous, full of love . . . a super smart book that will keep you up all nightReveals the truth behind the spirit, obsession and injustice across American historyThrilling . . . a book about the power and pain of wordsHorse isn't just an animal story-it's a moving narrative about race and art.This is historical fiction at its finest, connecting threads of the past with the present to illuminate that essentially human something . . . Calling all horse girls: This is the story of the most important racehorse you've never heard of, but it's also so much more than that.Brilliantly varied and with a galloping paceThe wonderful story of an extraordinary real-life racehorse... Brooks moves seamlessly between different times and places... the attention to historical details is impressiveThis deft novel moves between the present day and the Civil War era in a polyphonic examination of the fraught racial aspects of horse racing in US historyBrooks understands and empathises with all of her characters, and it is suspenseful and thoughtful - a masterpieceIn telling the story of an antebellum racehorse, Geraldine Brooks balances two compelling timelines and explores the rotten legacy of American slavery... It richly transcends the category of 'for horse lovers'
