Horse is an extraordinary novel of race, war and idealism. It is set partly in pre-Civil War Kentucky, partly in the New York of the 1950s. The story of Lexington, the fastest horse in nineteenth-century America, his black groom, and the white abolitionist who painted him is counterpointed with that of the woman who went on to own the horse’s famous painting.

Martha Jackson is at the centre of post World War 2’s New York art scene, and the social and sexual turbulence of the 1950s. The collision of these two stories takes Geraldine Brooks’s fans back to the brilliance of her Pulitzer-Prize winning March, and is her finest novel yet.