Horse: A Novel
“Brooks’ chronological and cross-disciplinary leaps are thrilling.” —The New York Times Book Review
“Horse isn’t just an animal story—it’s a moving narrative about race and art.” —TIME
“A thrilling story about humanity in all its ugliness and beauty . . . the evocative voices create a story so powerful, reading it feels like watching a neck-and-neck horse race, galloping to its conclusion—you just can’t look away.” —Oprah Daily
Winner of the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and the Dr. Tony Ryan Book Award · Finalist for the Chautauqua Prize · A Massachusetts Book Award Honor Book
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.
“Horse isn’t just an animal story—it’s a moving narrative about race and art.” —TIME
“A thrilling story about humanity in all its ugliness and beauty . . . the evocative voices create a story so powerful, reading it feels like watching a neck-and-neck horse race, galloping to its conclusion—you just can’t look away.” —Oprah Daily
Winner of the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and the Dr. Tony Ryan Book Award · Finalist for the Chautauqua Prize · A Massachusetts Book Award Honor Book
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.
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Readers say *Horse* by Geraldine Brooks is a beautifully written, richly researched novel praised for its masterful storytelling, vivid characters, an...
The Parish
This is one of my favorite books! I loved the weaving of time and history of the portraits.
thenextgoodbook.com
What fan of historical fiction doesn't love a new Geraldine Brooks story?
Full review on the site.
What fan of historical fiction doesn't love a new Geraldine Brooks story?
Full review on the site.
It took two attempts for me to get through Horse, which is unlike me. I really wanted to love it as I still think about The People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks to this day. For me there were just too many characters and the dual timeline, in this case, was disjointed. I really enjoyed Jarret and the story of his relationship with Lexington. While I saw the tie in between the 2019 timeline and the 1850’s timeline, the 1950’s timeline didn’t add anything to the story. 2.5 stars rounded up because of the painstaking research that obviously went into the writing of this novel.
So, it’s one of those novels where there’s some historical artifact—in this case a painting, or actually a set of them—that links together disparate narratives across historical divides. I don’t love the gimmick, though it’s also not enough to make me reject a novel out of hand. But how it works here is about how it seems to work generally: not particularly well. It ends up being one strong narrative tied to one or two weaker storylines, so rather than a whole greater than the sum of its parts, what you get is some parts propping the others up.
The only storyline that I think could stand on its own is Jarret’s. The 2019 thread is pretty weak—Theo & Jess are pretty thin characters, and their relationship doesn’t do enough to flesh them out. Their plotline just adds some light & color to the story of Jarret & Lexington, like a kind of coda, but it’s given too much space and laden with too much narrative weight for such a slight frame. And the sections with Martha Jackson are obviously just linking material; it’s not that they weren’t interesting, it’s more that there just never was much there.
As for the 19th-century plot, while I did get the most from it, it still had some real issues. The candy-coated depiction of slavery, as much as anything. There were brief flashes of realism and insight, but for the most part Jarret is just given a charmed life, presumably to make the whole thing palatable for 21st-century book-club readers. We are presented, for example, with the way that the system can cleave a child from his parent, emotionally as well as physically. (E.g., this sharp moment with Jarret’s father: “They are taking that too, he thought. Stealing his son’s love, his own boy’s respect.”) But those wounds don’t linger; they don’t even heal—they just disappear, and the story moves on. Likewise the way that privileges were so often used as cudgels against enslaved individuals—we see how Jarret can have them taken away at any time . . . and then they just aren’t.
Also, I found myself surprisingly confused by the paintings. That may be partly my own limitation: I’m not great at forming clear visuals from prose descriptions alone, so I literally couldn’t picture them. But the novel doesn’t do enough to distinguish them, thematically or otherwise. To me they started to feel like multiple characters with the same name. I kept wanting a clearer sense of which painting was where and what each one was supposed to represent. Since that remained cloudy, any deeper questions around recognition, ownership, preservation, and erasure never really landed for me.
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