His progress through the novel is propelled by disquieting transfers of ownership: he comes of age as “Warfield’s Jarret” is empowered and imperiled as “Ten Broeck’s Jarret” and so on, through emancipation. The character of Jarret was inspired by a fleeting reference in an old issue of Harper’s Magazine, informed by Brooks’ research on enslaved horse trainers, who had - tenuously - more authority and status on the turf than their counterparts in the fields. In short order, the action zooms back to 1850 and Jarret, a skilled groom whose enslaved father had bought his own freedom but couldn’t afford his son’s. The book opens with Theo, a doctoral candidate in art history at Georgetown University who pulls a painting of Lexington out of a hostile neighbor’s trash in 2019. This time, after novels about Judaism, the first Native American to graduate from Harvard and the biblical King David, Brooks focuses on two young Black men, giving them richly layered backgrounds and complicated inner lives (in an afterword, she thanks among others her son Bizu, whom she and her late husband, author Tony Horwitz, adopted from Ethiopia, for insight into the modern Black experience). In the New York Times, Brooks’ similarly accomplished contemporary, Thomas Mallon (a white man), criticized her (a white woman), for populating that book with a number of “slave saints and savants” in supporting roles, calling the result “treacly and embarrassing.” Others disagreed, and “March” went on to win a Pulitzer Prize.

Her novel “March” (2005) explored the life of the mostly absent father from Louisa May Alcott’s “Little Women,” a chaplain for the Union Army during the Civil War. Valuable legacies can disappear, is the underlying message - for years, this celebrity thoroughbred’s skeleton languished at the Smithsonian, shoved in an attic and marked only equus caballus - even as barbaric ones linger.Ī wide-ranging practitioner of historical fiction and adventuresome journalism, Brooks has visited the rocky terrain of race before.

The subtext, if not the subtitle, is “Race.” Not for the contests Lexington won, although those are re-created in detail suitable for the sports and society pages, but for the book’s confrontation of relations between Black and white people over the course of two centuries. The title of Geraldine Brooks’ new novel, “Horse,” alludes to Lexington: the real and extraordinary late-19th-century Kentucky bay stallion who drives its plot. Pulitzer winner Geraldine Brooks Photo: Randi Baird, photographer / Randi Baird

Geraldine brooks novels