Features

Caleb’s Crossing by Geraldine Brooks

Item: Caleb’s Crossing
Author: Sophie Cunningham

by Sophie Cunningham •

June 2011, no. 332

Fourth Estate, $32.99 pb, 369 pp, 9780732289225

Features

Caleb’s Crossing by Geraldine Brooks

by Sophie Cunningham •

June 2011, no. 332

Geraldine Brooks has an extraordinary radar for a good story, a curiosity that has carried her, and her readers, from Year of Wonders (2001), set during England’s plague of 1666; to March andthe American Civil War; to medieval Spain and the People of the Book (2008).Her latest novel, Caleb’s Crossing, is set closer to the place Brooks calls home – in the early settlement of Great Harbor on the island we now know as Martha’s Vineyard. It is a place that features heavily in the modern-day mythology surrounding the Kennedy clan, but back in the 1600s the island was party to a much more profound tragedy: the displacement of the Native American Indian.

Sophie Cunningham

Sophie Cunningham has been a writer and publisher in Australia for thirty years. A former publisher and editor, she is the author of two novels, Geography (2004) and Bird (2008). For the City Series, she wrote Melbourne (2011). Warning: The Story of Cyclone Tracy, her most recent book, was published by Text Publishing in 2014 and was long-listed for both a Walkley Award and the Kibble Prize. She is a former Editor of Meanjin, and until recently was Chair of the Literature Board of the Australia Council. She is a founding and current board member of The Stella Prize, a prize for Australian women’s writing. She lived in Brooklyn, New York, in 2014 and is now based in San Francisco, California. She is currently writing a novel called This Devastating Fever, about Leonard Woolf’s time in Ceylon in the early 1900s, and a collection of linked essays, tentatively entitled 50.