In a museum laboratory, a young osteologist – a scholar of bones – reassembles the skeleton of a 19th-century racehorse. The animal has spent decades fixed too haughtily upright; a prim parody of a thoroughbred. Rewired, he may run again, if only in the imaginations of those who stare at his bare, beautiful frame.
In her sixth novel, Horse, Geraldine Brooks attempts the same feat on the page – setting loose a history-bound stallion. Her subject is the famed Kentucky thoroughbred Lexington, king of the antebellum racetrack. “A horse so fast that the mass-produced stopwatch was manufactured so his fans could clock times in races that regularly drew more than twenty thousand spectators,” Brooks marvels. “A horse so handsome, that the best equestrian artists vied to paint him.” Lexington was famously virile, too, the greatest sire of his age; the father of dynasties and battle steeds.
