Jess missed … perhaps more than anything else about her Sydney home: the sense of being at the watery edge of things, turning a corner and being confronted by a shimmer of sunlight on waves, a crescent of sand curved below a rock-ribbed headland.Īfter these brief but effective introductions, Brooks then takes us back to Kentucky in the 1850s to begin the story of Lexington, the horse of the title, and his beloved groom Jarret, which swiftly establishes itself as the main story of the novel. Jess, perhaps like Brooks, misses aspects of her Australian home: Horse is no exception.īeginning in the twenty-first century with Theo, a young Black PhD student in Washington DC, who by chance comes across a painting of a horse, Brooks segues seamlessly into the story of Jess, a young Australian who runs the vertebrate osteology lab in the Smithsonian, which is more fun than it sounds. What isn’t she up to? For over two decades Brooks’ net has been cast far and wide and whatever she fetches up is always written about convincingly, interestingly, and engagingly. Geraldine Brooks takes on a mighty task in her latest novel, Horse, covering events leading up to the American Civil War through the story of champion runner Lexington, and juxtaposing contemporary events, complete with the vague tremors of political correctness that shape so many people’s thoughts today. In unearthing the story of a 19th-century thoroughbred, Pulitzer Prize-winner Geraldine Brooks examines racism then and now.
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