Geraldine Brooks

Geraldine Brooks

Viking Books asks Geraldine Brooks some fascinating questions about her new novel, Horse. HORSE is based on a real-life racehorse named Lexington, one of the most famous thoroughbreds in American history. How did you learn about him? I had just…

Shakespeare’s Son Died at 11. A Novel Asks How It Shaped His Art.

HAMNET A Novel of the Plague By Maggie O’Farrell “Hamnet” is an exploration of marriage and grief written into the silent opacities of a life that is at once extremely famous and profoundly obscure. [ The editors of The Book Review chose this as one…

Two Villages, Two Eras, Two Plagues

In the summer of 1990, before Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, I took a rare break from my job as a Middle East correspondent for The Wall Street Journal. Escaping the hot, dusty landscapes of my beat for a few days, I went for a restorative ramble…

Iranian Blood Is on Our Hands, Too

It was a hot day in June, 30 years ago. I was sweating in a chador, a speck in the black-clad throng of mourners pouring through Tehran for the funeral of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. As the keening crowd surged dangerously toward the grave site, I…

Giving Voice to Homer’s Women

THE SILENCE OF THE GIRLS By Pat Barker 293 pp. Doubleday. $27.95. “War is men’s business,” Hector says in the “Iliad.” Pat Barker begs to differ. The British novelist has made war her subject, winning the 1995 Booker Prize for “Ghost Road,” the final…

In Orhan Pamuk’s New Novel, a Youthful Obsession Yields a Haunted Life

THE RED-HAIRED WOMAN By Orhan Pamuk Translated by Ekin Oklap 272 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $27.95. A sense of place animates many novelists, but few more than Orhan Pamuk, for whom personal geography is artistic destiny. Istanbul, his home and his muse,…

The Dovekeeper and the Children’s Intifada

Their plans were quite precise: they wouldn’t attack women, or the elderly, or children like themselves. Their targets, they agreed, would be men in their late teens and early twenties—young men of military age. All this was settled between them…

Aharon Appelfeld’s Novel Follows a Young Holocaust Refugee to Palestine

THE MAN WHO NEVER STOPPED SLEEPING By Aharon Appelfeld Translated by Jeffrey M. Green 288 pp. Schocken Books. $26. The Israeli novelist Aharon Appelfeld has said he must hear “the music” of a novel before he can begin to write it. If that’s so, then…

For book groups: Great TV feature and interview

This 20 minute segment has wonderful art and a very wide ranging interview about The Secret Chord.http://www.hectv.org/watch/maryville-talks-books/the-secret-chord-one-on-one-with-geraldine-brooks/21227/

A Week in the Life of Geraldine Brooks

It’s dark when we nose down the driveway on the way to the 7 a.m. ferry. This year, for the first time, my 12-year-old son is going to school on the mainland, or “over in America,” as some old-time Martha’s Vineyard residents say. We carpool with the…

The King and I

The novel was coming along quite well, until I got to the foreskins. I write historical fiction. Some consider this an outré craft. If literary fiction is Brooklyn, the historical novel is Queens. It’s a “gimcrack genre” to the critic James Wood, “a…

New York Times calls Secret Chord “blazing,” “masterly.”

“A thundering, gritty, emotionally devastating reconsideration of the story of King David makes a masterly case for the generative power of retelling,” says Alana Newhouse in the Oct 25th Book Review. “What’s added, to blazing effect, are the other…

Alice “Dovekeepers” Hoffman review in the Washington Post

“Beautifully drawn in its complexity and sheer joy,” says Alice Hoffman, author of many novels, including The Dovekeepers. Read her full Washington Post review here:…

“Peerless historical fiction”–first British review

The UK’s Top 10 Books of the Month names The Secret Chord “spellbinding. The People of the Book was a properly luxurious affair – boldly plotted, deftly written and masterly in its blend of intelligence and pace. The Secret Chord is much the same,…

Booklist Starred Review of The Secret Chord

“In her gorgeously written novel of ambition, courage, retribution, and triumph, Brooks imagines the life and character of King David in all his complexity, from his humble childhood through old age. A brilliant harpist and singer with immense…

Signing Galleys at Book Expo NYC

Book Expo at the vast Javits Center can be overwhelming, so it was good to see so many booksellers I know at my signing. I had such an amazing time connecting with so many of my readers. We took lots of photos together which you can see over on my…

Bring out your (walking) dead?

Andrew Lincoln as Michael Mompellion in Year of Wonders? His company has optioned the novel. Now, who should play Anna Frith?

Meet me in St Louis, or Miami, Philly, Auckland, Sydney, Toronto…

Four countries, thirty cities. My biggest tour ever, for The Secret Chord, kicks off October 6 in Boston. You can see all my dates here

And the winner is…

Honored to chair the National Book Award’s Fiction jury, and to present the prize to Phil Klay, for Redeployment.

The Secret Chord

A rich and utterly absorbing novel about the life of King David, from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of People of the Book and March With more than two million copies of her novels sold, New York Times bestselling author Geraldine Brooks has…