Description

From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author, a sweeping story of spirit, obsession and injustice across American history

‘I loved this book so much – an important book, gorgeous, full of love’ Ann Patchett
‘A masterpiece’ Jane Smiley
‘Thrilling… a book about the power and pain of words’ New York Times
‘Everyone should read Geraldine Brooks’ Guardian

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 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 19th 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, who became America’s greatest stud sire, Horse is an original ,gripping, multi-layered reckoning with the legacy of enslavement and racism in America.

Publisher Review

Everyone should read Geraldine Brooks * Guardian * There's something bordering on the supernatural about Geraldine Brooks. She seems able to transport herself back to earlier time periods, to time travel. Sometimes, reading her work, she draws you so thoroughly into another era that you swear she's actually lived in it. -- Matthew Gilbert * The Boston Globe * Brook is a master at bringing the past alive . . . in [her] skillful hands the issues of the past echo our own deepest concerns: love and loss, drama and tragedy, chaos and brutality. -- Alice Hoffman * The Washington Post * One of our most supple and insightful novelists . . . Brooks is an adventurous of a novelist as she once was a journalist . . . her journalistic sense of story has remained vibrant. -- Jane Smiley * The New York Times Book Review * Few fiction writers travel across territory as vast as that staked out by the intrepid Geraldine Brooks . . . There's a romance between Brooks and the world, and her writing is as full of heart and curiosity as it is intelligence and judgement . . . her appetite for detail, her wanting to know how things work and why they happened, is enormous. -- Carrie Brown * The Boston Globe * I loved this book so much - an important book, gorgeous, full of love . . . a super smart book that will keep you up all night -- Ann Patchett