Horse
Geraldine Brooks braids three timelines around a real nineteenth-century racehorse: an enslaved groom in 1850s Kentucky whose bond with the stallion Lexington shapes a life he cannot control, a Washington scientist cataloguing the horse's bones in the present, and a 1950s New York gallerist who stumbles on the forgotten equestrian paintings that preserved him. The novel moves between these threads to examine how American art, science, and sport have both recorded and erased Black labor. The result is a quiet, research-rich historical novel in which a single animal becomes a lens on two centuries of race in the United States.
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What you might want to know about Horse
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
The story of Lexington, the greatest American racehorse of the 19th century, is told through three threads: his enslaved trainer Jarret, an itinerant painter, and a present-day Smithsonian scientist.
Yes. Horse is fictional but built around the real 19th-century racehorse Lexington and the Black horsemen who trained Thoroughbreds in the antebellum South. Geraldine Brooks researched the period and the horse's documented history extensively.
Horse was a New York Times bestseller and was widely featured on year-end best-of lists in 2022. Geraldine Brooks won the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for her earlier novel March.
Horse was written by Geraldine Brooks, published in 2022 by Penguin Publishing Group.
Horse is 352 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, Horse takes most readers 5 to 8 hours to finish.
Horse is a standalone novel by Geraldine Brooks, not part of a series.
Horse is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.
