Geraldine Brooks

March hands Little Women's absent father the year he spent at the war, as a chaplain who arrives believing in the cause and comes home unable to say what he saw, and it won the Pulitzer for fiction in 2006. Caleb's Crossing is built on the first Native American to graduate from Harvard, in 1665. Brooks reported for a Wall Street Journal foreign desk across the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans, and Nine Parts of Desire came out of covering women's lives in Islamic societies. Horse runs a racehorse, an enslaved groom who trained him and a modern art historian in the same book. She is Australian and lives on Martha's Vineyard.