Geraldine Brooks Books in Order

If you want her big historical novels: Year of Wonders → March → People of the Book → Horse.
If you're interested in faith and the past: Caleb's Crossing → The Secret Chord.
If you prefer her nonfiction and journalism roots: Nine Parts of Desire → Foreign Correspondence → Memorial Days.
If you enjoy writers on writing: On Tim Winton.

Geraldine Brooks was born in Sydney in 1955 and grew up thinking the important stories were happening far away. Over time she proved herself wrong. First as a foreign correspondent, then as a novelist and memoirist, she has spent decades turning overlooked corners of history, and the rooms of her own life, into vivid, human scale narratives.

She grew up in the inner west suburb of Ashfield, the daughter of Lawrie Brooks, an American big band singer turned newspaper sub editor, and Gloria, who had left the country town of Boorowa to work in radio publicity. Money was tight, but there were books, newspapers and long conversations about politics and justice.

At Bethlehem College, a Catholic girls' school, she discovered that reading could be a way out of the constraints of class and geography. At the University of Sydney she studied arts and joined the campus paper. After graduating she joined the Sydney Morning Herald, where she wrote features on environmental issues and local politics and learned how to chase stubborn stories to the end.

In 1982 she won the Greg Shackleton scholarship to study journalism at Columbia University in New York. That move changed everything. She stayed in the United States, joined the Wall Street Journal and spent more than a decade reporting from conflict zones in the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. Her and her husband Tony Horwitz's coverage of the Gulf war earned one of the top awards in international reporting.

Brooks and Horwitz married in a small village in southern France in 1984, and she later converted to Judaism. Both were endlessly curious about how ordinary people live under pressure. Those years on the road became the spine of her first books, the nonfiction works Nine Parts of Desire and Foreign Correspondence, which draw on her encounters with Muslim women and on the pen pals who once helped her imagine life beyond suburban Sydney.

In her late thirties she began to turn toward fiction. Year of Wonders reimagines the true story of an English village that chose to quarantine itself during a seventeenth century plague. March follows the absent father from Louisa May Alcott's Little Women into the American Civil War and won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2006, bringing many new readers to her work.

Later novels such as People of the Book, Caleb's Crossing, The Secret Chord and Horse take similar leaps from a fragment of fact, a historic figure or a fragile object. Across these stories she is drawn to people who cross borders of faith, language and race, and to the quiet details that connect domestic life to the large forces of history.

Alongside the novels, Brooks has continued to write essays, lectures and memoir. She has reflected on Muslim women's lives, on her own childhood in Australia, and on the work of other writers in On Tim Winton and her Boyer Lectures, later collected as The Idea of Home. Her shelves now hold honours that include major Australian prizes, international book awards and, in 2025, the Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction.

Brooks and Horwitz raised two sons and for many years divided their time between Virginia, Sydney and the island of Martha's Vineyard in Massachusetts. After Horwitz died suddenly in 2019, she wrote the memoir Memorial Days, a clear eyed account of grief, marriage and the rituals that can help the living go on. She continues to write from a farmhouse on Martha's Vineyard and from the Australian coast, carrying both hemispheres into every story.