Australian-born Geraldine Brooks is an author and journalist who grew up in the Western suburbs of Sydney, and attended Bethlehem College Ashfield and the University of Sydney. She worked as a reporter for The Sydney Morning Herald for three years as a feature writer with a special interest in environmental issues, and later for The Wall Street Journal, where she covered crises in the the Middle East, Africa, and the Balkans. She was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in fiction in 2006 for her novel March. Her first novel, Year of Wonders, is an international bestseller, and People of the Book is a New York Times bestseller translated into 20 languages.Her latest novel is Caleb’s Crossing.
One of her favorite works of historical fiction, as told to The Daily Beast:
Read about the other books on the list.Wolf Hall
by Hilary Mantel
A justly lauded masterpiece. The Tudor period is well-trodden ground in historical fiction and I admit I picked this book up wearily, thinking I knew it all. From the first pages it was clear that Mantel had sidestepped the ruts and blazed her own highly original path through the intrigues of Henry's court. Her Thomas Cromwell truly is a man in full; perhaps the most completely realized character study in the fiction of this or any other era.
Wolf Hall made Lev Grossman's list of the top ten fiction books of 2009; Matt Beynon Rees called it "[s]imply the best historical novel for many, many years."
--Marshal Zeringue
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