Start with Year of Wonders. It is her first novel, it is the shortest and most propulsive, and it is the clearest demonstration of what she does: take a documented episode, find the gap in the record where nobody wrote anything down, and put a person in it.
The alternative first choice is March, which won the Pulitzer Prize. It is the better-argued book, but it is built on top of Little Women and reads differently if you have not met the Marches, so it is a poor entry point. There is no series here and no chronology — every book stands alone — so the order is purely about which to try.
Where the record ends and the invention begins
This is the useful thing to know about Brooks, because her novels are researched closely enough that readers routinely mistake the invented parts for history.
Year of Wonders is set in Eyam, Derbyshire, in 1665 and 1666. The village really did quarantine itself when plague arrived in a bolt of cloth, and the clergymen who organised it were real. Anna Frith, the narrator, is invented, as is almost everything she does. The final section travels somewhere the historical record does not go at all, and most readers find it the weakest part of an otherwise disciplined book.
March takes the absent father of Little Women and sends him to the Civil War. The framework is drawn partly from the journals and letters of Bronson Alcott and the Concord circle around him; the war service, the Virginia plantation and the moral collapse at the centre are invention.
People of the book is built around the Sarajevo Haggadah, a real illuminated fourteenth-century Hebrew manuscript that really was hidden from the Nazis by a Muslim librarian and sheltered again during the 1990s siege. The conservator Hanna Heath and the entire back-chain of earlier owners are invented — the novel is openly a chain of what-ifs hung on a real object.
Caleb's crossing is the hardest case. Caleb Cheeshahteaumuck, a Wampanoag man, genuinely graduated from Harvard in 1665, and almost nothing else about him is documented. Brooks says as much. The narrator Bethia is invented and so is virtually the whole interior life of the book, which is a defensible response to an archive that recorded a Native scholar and then recorded nothing of what he thought.
The Secret Chord retells King David from the books of Samuel, keeping the ugly material the tradition tends to skip and inventing the connective tissue around it. Horse braids the documented racehorse Lexington and the enslaved grooms who made him with a contemporary Washington strand; the modern plotline is the part readers argue about.
The nonfiction
Nine Parts of Desire is reportage, not history — it comes out of her years as a Wall Street Journal correspondent in the Middle East and is now three decades old. Read it as a record of the early 1990s, because it has been overtaken repeatedly since.
Foreign correspondence is a memoir in which she tracks down the childhood pen pals she wrote to from suburban Sydney. The Idea of Home is the text of the 2011 Boyer Lectures, a short Australian broadcast series rather than a book-length argument. Memorial Days is a late memoir about the sudden death of her husband, the writer Tony Horwitz, and about the grief afterwards; it is the most personal thing on this list by a wide margin.
A note on the editions here
A few of these records are foreign-language or large-print printings rather than the standard English trade editions. Check the language and format on the listing before ordering.
Where to stop
There is no wrong stopping point, since nothing continues. If you want two, read Year of Wonders and March. If you want the argument about historical fiction itself, read Caleb's crossing and then look at what else the catalogue holds.
Follow the full ordered path here: Geraldine Brooks books in order: where to start.
