With her meticulous research, Geraldine Brooks immerses the reader in the fascinating world of American Horseracing and race in the antebellum South from 1850 to 1861, where for wealthy white men, racehorse ownership is a matter of great prestige and profit. They divide their time between homes in Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts, and Sydney, Australia. They have two sons– Nathaniel and Bizuayehu–and two dogs. She is also the author of the nonfiction works Nine Parts of Desire and Foreign Correspondence.īrooks married author Tony Horwitz in Tourette-sur-Loup, France, in 1984. Her first novel, Year of Wonders, is an international bestseller, and People of the Book is a New York Times bestseller translated into 20 languages. She was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in fiction in 2006 for her novel March. Later she worked for The Wall Street Journal, where she covered crises in the the Middle East, Africa, and the Balkans. In 1982 she won the Greg Shackleton Australian News Correspondents scholarship to the journalism master’s program at Columbia University in New York City. She worked as a reporter for The Sydney Morning Herald for three years as a feature writer with a special interest in environmental issues. Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.Īustralian-born Geraldine Brooks is an author and journalist who grew up in the Western suburbs of Sydney, and attended Bethlehem College Ashfield and the University of Sydney. 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.īased on the remarkable true story of the record-breaking thoroughbred Lexington, Horse is a novel of art and science, love and obsession, and our unfinished reckoning with racism.

Martha Jackson, a gallery owner celebrated for taking risks on edgy contemporary painters, becomes obsessed with a nineteenth-century equestrian oil painting of mysterious provenance.

On a perilous night, he reunites with the stallion and his groom, very far from the glamor of any racetrack.

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. 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. 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 braids a sweeping story of spirit, obsession, and injustice across American history

March brooks book review