Geraldine Brooks is the author of four novels, the Pulitzer Prize–winning March and the international bestsellers Caleb’s Crossing, People of the Book, and Year of Wonders. She has also written the acclaimed nonfiction works Nine Parts of Desire and Foreign Correspondence. Her most recent novel, Caleb’s Crossing, was the winner of the New England Book Award for Fiction and the Christianity Today Book Award, and was a finalist for the Langum Prize in American Historical Fiction. Born and raised in Australia, she lives on Martha’s Vineyard with her husband, the author Tony Horwitz.
Praise for The Secret Chord
“A page turner. . .Brooks is a master at bringing the past alive. .
.in [her]skillful hands the issues of the past echo our own deepest
concerns: love and loss, drama and tragedy, chaos and
brutality.”
—Alice Hoffman, The Washington Post
“The Secret Chord—a thundering, gritty, emotionally
devastating reconsideration of the story of King David—makes a
masterly case for the generative power of retelling. . .some of the
magic here has to do with setting and time—for sensory dramatics,
it’s hard to compete with the Iron Age Middle East. . .but Brooks’s
real accomplishment is that she also enables readers to feel the
spirit of the place.”
—The New York Times
“There’s something bordering on the supernatural about Geraldine
Brooks. She seems able to transport herself back to earlier
time periods, to time travel. Sometimes, reading her work,
she draws you so thoroughly into another era that you swear she’s
actually lived in it. With sensory acuity and a deep and
complex understanding of emotional states, she conjures up the way
we lived then. . .Brooks has humanized the king and cleverly added
a modern perspective to our understanding of him. . .[Her] vision
of the biblical world is enrapturing.”
—The Boston Globe
“The David that bursts off the page in this chronicle is a
larger-than-life commixture of virtues and flaws. . .I may be late
to the party on the amazing Ms. Brooks, but The Secret Chord won me
over. Its storytelling magic is as timeless as the tale it
tells.”
—The San Francisco Chronicle
“It’s this David – gifted artist, vainglorious alpha male,
conflicted husband and father – that we meet in The Secret Chord,
the beautiful, subtle, grave new novel by Geraldine Brooks. . .The
Secret Chord paints [a] fresh portrait of King David. . .For
Brooks, David is interesting not for his status as the most
beautiful man in art history, but, rather, for his matrix of
contradictions. . .in this telling, he is the Bible’s ultimate
Machiavellian.”
—USA Today
“Rich and imaginative. . .Thanks to Brooks, David is as compelling
as he is contradictory, with the writing in The Secret Chord as
lyrical as the lyre that David plays.”
—The Minneapolis Star Tribune
“Deeply sympathetic. . .Brooks offers new perspectives on a
character whose story has captured the Western imagination for
millennia. . .she breaks from the biblical version by giving voice
to the voiceless women in David’s life: wives and lovers, a
daughter, a mother -- the beloved and the scorned.”
—The Chicago Tribune
“A compelling read, contemporary in its relevance. . .The Secret
Chord is powerful storytelling, its landscape and time evoked in
lyrical prose.”
—The Guardian
“The best historical fiction. . .Brooks gives the whole king his
due. . .It’s a tall order to breathe life into such a human being,
and she manages it admirably.”
-—NPR
“In The Secret Chord, Brooks does what she does best: bring
psychological realism and dramatic arc to a subject we scantly know
from history and myth. . .The result yields a gripping tale of a
ruler’s stresses and sacrifices, his triumphs and shames. The
Secret Chord reads like a Shakespeare history play with a dash of
Machiavelli.”
—The Dallas Morning News
“[A] deeply imaginative exploration of this once powerful but
deeply flawed ruler. . .Brooks is a gifted, engrossing
storyteller. Like March and People of the Book, The Secret
Chord is studded with action, interesting characters, sweeping
timelines and moving scenes filled with drama and conflict. . .a
timely and universal exploration of the limits of loyalty, the
seductive and corrupting influence of power, and the intersections
between sin and faith, punishment and redemption.”
—The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
“George R.R. Martin’s got nothing on the biblical chroniclers of
David, kind of Israel. Incest? Treachery and murder?
Marriages for love and political alliance? This is the
original Game of Thrones. . .Each of the members of David’s court
comes into sharp relief.”
—The Miami Herald
“Like her beautiful descriptions of David as worshipful musician,
Brooks' surface details befit the ancient story. Her delicate
rendering of the spare, sun-pierced land is a painful foreshadowing
of its still-embattled importance.”
—Philadelphia Inquirer
“The Pulitzer-Prize winning author has succeeded in
humanizing a mythic figure, breathing life, emotion, and literary
resonance into a midrash that transforms David the King into David
the Man.”
—Haaretz.com
“In her gorgeously written novel of ambition, courage, retribution,
and triumph, Brooks imagines the life and character of King David
in all his complexity. . .The language, clear and precise
throughout, turns soaringly poetic when describing music or the
glory of David’s city. . .taken as a whole, the novel feels
simultaneously ancient, accessible, and timeless.”
—ALA Booklist
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