Horse

From the Pulitzer Prize winning author of March and People of the Book comes a vivid and unique new novel for lovers of sweeping historical fiction and books about iconic racehorses like Seabiscuit and Secretariat.

Four decades after covering horse racing as a cadet reporter for the Sydney Morning Herald, award-winning novelist Geraldine Brooks has returned to the track. Her latest book is based on the true story of Lexington, America's greatest racehorse-a beast so fleet-footed that he inspired the invention of the mass-produced stopwatch and became the subject of several paintings. One such painting is the novel's narrative linchpin, anchoring the multiple timelines that dramatise Lexington's life and legacy. In present-day Washington, DC, PhD student Theo rescues the abandoned artwork from a kerbside; his interest in its provenance sharpens when he meets Jess, a Smithsonian scientist who's discovered Lexington's articulated skeleton stored in a museum attic. In 1850 Kentucky, Jarret, an enslaved groom, witnesses the birth of a foal with four white feet; boy and horse are later captured in a painting by artist Thomas J Scott. As Jarret forms a bond with Lexington and helps transform him from playful colt to record-breaking athlete, the rumblings of civil war begin reverberating across America. Brooks' deep empathy as a novelist and her ability to make the past feel as tangible as yesterday make Horse more than the story of a remarkable thoroughbred-with its richly rendered characters and seamless interweaving of past and present, it adroitly captures America's ongoing struggle with racial injustice and the complex relationships between humans and animals. In the words of one character, 'a new horse is all promise'-and Brooks' new novel is a promise fulfilled. Carody Culver is senior editor at Griffith Review and a freelance writer.

Australian-born Geraldine Brooks is an author and journalist who grew up in Sydney's western suburbs. She worked for the Sydney Morning Herald and in 1982 she won the Greg Shackleton scholarship to the journalism master's program at Columbia University. Later she worked for the Wall Street Journal, where she covered crises in the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. In 2006 she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in fiction for her novel March. Her novels Caleb's Crossing, People of the Book and The Secret Chord were New York Times bestsellers, and Year of Wonders was an international bestseller, translated into more than 25 languages. She is also the author of the acclaimed non-fiction works Nine Parts of Desire and Foreign Correspondence. Her novel Horse was the winner of the ABIA Literary Fiction Book of the Year Award and Fiction Indie Book Award for 2023, the 88th Annual Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for 2023, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize for Fiction and was shortlisted for the ARA Historical Novel Prize 2022 and the BookPeople Adult Fiction Book of the Year 2023. In 2011 she presented Australia's prestigious Boyer Lectures, later published as The Idea of Home. In 2016 she was appointed Officer in the Order of Australia for her services to literature. Geraldine Brooks divides her time between Sydney and Massachusetts and has two sons.

SHORTLISTED FOR THE ARA HISTORICAL NOVEL PRIZE 2022 'He tilted his desk lamp so that the light fell on the image. The head of a bright bay colt gazed out of the canvas, the expression in the eyes unusual and haunting.' A discarded painting in a roadside clean-up, forgotten bones in a research archive, and Lexington, the greatest racehorse in US history. From these strands of fact, Geraldine Brooks weaves 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, even as the nation reels towards war. An itinerant young artist who makes his name from paintings of the horse takes up arms for the Union and reconnects with the stallion and his groom on a perilous night 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 nineteenth-century 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.With the moral complexity of March and a multi-stranded narrative reminiscent of People of the Book , this enthralling novel is a gripping reckoning with the legacy of enslavement and racism in America. Horse is the latest masterpiece from a writer with a prodigious talent for bringing the past to life.'Geraldine Brooks' soulful tour de force ... The storytelling is magical and so too are the characters, whose pleasure and pain we feel intensely' The Australian Women's Weekly 'Bring[s] to light the way that race and power are encoded into everyday interactions ... a deeply compassionate novel' Weekend Australian 'Brooks' chronological and cross-disciplinary leaps are thrilling... [ Horse ] is really a book about the power and pain of words... Lexington is ennobled by art and science, and roars back from obscurity to achieve the high status of metaphor' New York Times Book Review '[A] sweeping tale ... fluid, masterful storytelling ... [Brooks] writes about our present in such a way that the tangled roots of history, just beneath the story, are both subtle and undeniable' MAGGIE SHIPSTEAD, Washington Post 'Brooks [has an] almost

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