Horse

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.

Everyone should read Geraldine Brooks, There'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.

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.