Why everyone should read Geraldine Brooks

Rightly revered in Australia for wide-ranging fiction and reportage, Pulitzer-winner Brooks has never written a bad book – and more people should read her. Here are five titles everyone should pick up

The most confounding thing about Geraldine Brooks’s writing is how consistently good it is: it doesn’t matter if she is recalling an interview with a disarmingly amiable Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran or spinning a Pulitzer-winning yarn about the missing father from Little Women – every book is remarkable. Working as a journalist did not beat the poet out of her – Brooks’s fiction is frequently beautiful, poetic at times, packed full of sentences to relish aloud – a river of “water as unlike our clear fast-flowing freshets as a fat broody hen to a hummingbird” in March; the hero who “walked through the woods like a young Adam, naming creation” in Caleb’s Crossing.

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