Reporter to raconteur

Not too far into writing People of the Book, Geraldine Brooks knew she was in trouble.

A former Wall Street Journal foreign correspondent, Brooks had just made the transition from fact to fiction. Her historical novel, Year of Wonders, had been well-received when it was published in 2001, and she had plunged straight into another.

Spanning five centuries, it was to centre on the Sarajevo Haggadah, an extraordinary, centuries-old Hebrew manuscript she had heard about years earlier on a reporting trip to Bosnia.

She planned a number of chapters featuring people connected to the Haggadah in different European cities and historical situations. Helping link them would be the story of a contemporary Bosnian conservator of manuscripts.

But she couldn't hear the conservator's voice. “Sarajevans have a very distinct voice,'' Brooks says. “It's kind of a soulful Slavic thing with a very witty, edgy European overlay to it, with cynicism that comes from having lived in a Communist regime.''

About that time, another book idea “came flying through the window'' — for a Civil War novel called March.
She put the Haggadah project aside to write it. March won the 2006 Pulitzer Prize.

Voice found

And when Brooks finally went back to People of the Book — which now sits on bestseller lists — she quickly solved the problem of the contemporary curator's voice. She switched the character's nationality from Bosnian to Australian.

Born and raised in Australia herself, Brooks found that Hanna Heath “just jumped onto the page''. For one thing, Hanna's mother is a high-powered surgeon who mocks her daughter's wimpy career choice — and her creator wants no confusion on this point.

“She's absolutely not my mother,'' Brooks says. “My mum and I were always best friends.''

They got to be such friends, in part, because Brooks's charmed life began with her being sick a lot.

Her American-born father, Lawrie Brooks, was an itinerant big-band singer who had settled down in Australia as a newspaper proofreader. Her mother, Gloria, had been a radio announcer in Canberra.

Brooks grew up in a working-class neighbourhood of Sydney where, not long after she started school, medical tests showed she had “serious blood anomalies''.

The bad news was recurring illness and social isolation. The good news was, in effect, home schooling: “magical times when I basked in my mother's undivided attention.''

Eventually, Brooks became healthy and went back to school. But when she got to the University of Sydney, a couple of very different sides to her were still at war inside her.

Needing to resolve the tension between “wanting risk and adventure and just not being able to talk to strangers'', she turned to her mother for help. “Her advice was: ‘Figure out what it is that you're afraid of and just keep doing it until you stop being afraid.'''

New ball game

This explains why Brooks signed up for the drama society and why, more than a decade later, she said yes when the Wall Street Journal asked her to cover the Middle East. But the Middle East was terrifying on a whole new scale.

Tony Horwitz — whom Brooks had met while she was at the graduate school of journalism, Columbia, and went on to become her husband — accompanied her. He mentions a reporting moment “emblematic of her style''.

She had been sent to cover the Palestinian intifada. As she drove alone through the West Bank, Palestinian boys started heaving rocks at her car.

Horwitz says, Brooks “leaped out of the car and chased after her assailants so she could interview them''.

But back to her book. Reviews of People of the Book have not been uniformly enthusiastic. The Washington Post's Jonathan Yardley praised it as “intelligent, thoughtful, gracefully written and original''.

He noted that the book “resides comfortably ... between popular fiction and literature''. But New York Times's Janet Maslin called it “schematic'' and overburdened by research.
Writers are rarely impervious to criticism, but Brooks has a helpful way to keep it in perspective.

Ever since she took her fictional leap, she says, “everything that's happened has exceeded my expectation''. All she had hoped was “to sell enough books to be able to continue to write''.

That writing happens on Martha's Vineyard these days. She and Horwitz lived for many years in the village of Waterford but moved north a couple of years ago when Loudoun County started to feel too overdeveloped.

Besides their 11-year-old son, Nathaniel, their household now includes three dogs, Brooks's mother, who has Alzheimer's, and her nephew.

“Did you see that movie Little Miss Sunshine? It's just like that,'' Geraldine Brooks says.