'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
'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 glamor 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.
'Based 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.' (Publication summary)
Epigraph:
It will be the past
and we'll live there together
Patrick Philips, Heaven
'For Pulitzer Prize-winning author and journalist Geraldine Brooks, history is rich with stories and characters that can illuminate the complexities of human experience. At the centre of her most recent novel, Horse, is a particularly famous four-legged figure: Lexington, the legendary American racehorse. But part of what led Brooks to this story – and the complex layers of injustice that lay beneath it – was her own late introduction to horseriding. In this conversation with Griffith Review Editor Carody Culver, Brooks shares the genesis and evolution of her relationship with man’s second-best friend.' (Publication abstract)
'Horse? Could that title sound familiar because it was a Richard Harris movie of the 1960s? Well, Geraldine Brooks, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for March (2005) and author of novels about everything from the characters in Little Women to the life of King David, is not one to be deterred by daunting precedents. She is a senior journalist who has gone on to use her capacity to master information and then spin it to spectacular effect in order to tell a story in which historical data and its artful arrangement yield an effect that is epical because of the way a many-voiced choir animates the chorales that underline the Passion that is dramatised.'(Introduction)
'It is a truth universally acknowledged that journalists start their careers in unexpected places. For Sydney-born Geraldine Brooks it was compiling the horse-racing results for the then Fairfax press. Some decades, five novels and an unexpected lunchtime conversation later, Brooks has made the main character of her new novel a champion American thoroughbred from the mid-19th century.' (Introduction)
In a letter accompanying the advance copy of her latest novel, Pulitzer Prize winner Geraldine Brooks reveals the inspiration for Horse.
'For Pulitzer Prize-winning author and journalist Geraldine Brooks, history is rich with stories and characters that can illuminate the complexities of human experience. At the centre of her most recent novel, Horse, is a particularly famous four-legged figure: Lexington, the legendary American racehorse. But part of what led Brooks to this story – and the complex layers of injustice that lay beneath it – was her own late introduction to horseriding. In this conversation with Griffith Review Editor Carody Culver, Brooks shares the genesis and evolution of her relationship with man’s second-best friend.' (Publication abstract)
