Publisher Description

"A page turner. . .Brooks is a master at bringing the past alive. . .in her skillful hands the issues of the past echo our own deepest concerns:  love and loss, drama and tragedy, chaos and brutality." – Alice Hoffman, The Washington Post

A rich and utterly absorbing novel about the life of King David, from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of People of the Book and March.
 
With more than two million copies of her novels sold, New York Times bestselling author Geraldine Brooks has achieved both popular and critical acclaim. Now, Brooks takes on one of literature's richest and most enigmatic figures: a man who shimmers between history and legend. Peeling away the myth to bring David to life in Second Iron Age Israel, Brooks traces the arc of his journey from obscurity to fame, from shepherd to soldier, from hero to traitor, from beloved king to murderous despot and into his remorseful and diminished dotage.

The Secret Chord provides new context for some of the best-known episodes of David's life while also focusing on others, even more remarkable and emotionally intense, that have been neglected.  We see David through the eyes of those who love him or fear him—from the prophet Natan, voice of his conscience, to his wives Mikhal, Avigail, and Batsheva, and finally to Solomon, the late-born son who redeems his Lear-like old age. Brooks has an uncanny ability to hear and transform characters from history, and this beautifully written, unvarnished saga of faith, desire, family, ambition, betrayal, and power will enthrall her many fans.

Author Biography

Geraldine Brooks is the author of four novels, the Pulitzer Prize–winning March and the international bestsellers Caleb's Crossing, People of the Book, and Year of Wonders. She has also written the acclaimed nonfiction works Nine Parts of Desire and Foreign Correspondence. Her most recent novel, Caleb's Crossing, was the winner of the New England Book Award for Fiction and the Christianity Today Book Award, and was a finalist for the Langum Prize in American Historical Fiction. Born and raised in Australia, she lives on Martha's Vineyard with her husband, the author Tony Horwitz.

Review

Praise for The Secret Chord

"A page turner. . .Brooks is a master at bringing the past alive. . .in [her]skillful hands the issues of the past echo our own deepest concerns:  love and loss, drama and tragedy, chaos and brutality."
—Alice Hoffman, The Washington Post

"The Secret Chord—a thundering, gritty, emotionally devastating reconsideration of the story of King David—makes a masterly case for the generative power of retelling. . .some of the magic here has to do with setting and time—for sensory dramatics, it's hard to compete with the Iron Age Middle East. . .but Brooks's real accomplishment is that she also enables readers to feel the spirit of the place."
—The New York Times 

"There's something bordering on the supernatural about Geraldine Brooks.  She seems able to transport herself back to earlier time periods, to time travel.  Sometimes, reading her work, she draws you so thoroughly into another era that you swear she's actually lived in it.  With sensory acuity and a deep and complex understanding of emotional states, she conjures up the way we lived then. . .Brooks has humanized the king and cleverly added a modern perspective to our understanding of him. . .[Her] vision of the biblical world is enrapturing."
  —The Boston Globe

"The David that bursts off the page in this chronicle is a larger-than-life commixture of virtues and flaws. . .I may be late to the party on the amazing Ms. Brooks, but The Secret Chord won me over.  Its storytelling magic is as timeless as the tale it tells."
—The San Francisco Chronicle
                                                                  
"It's this David – gifted artist, vainglorious alpha male, conflicted husband and father – that we meet in The Secret Chord, the beautiful, subtle, grave new novel by Geraldine Brooks. . .The Secret Chord paints [a] fresh portrait of King David. . .For Brooks, David is interesting not for his status as the most beautiful man in art history, but, rather, for his matrix of contradictions. . .in this telling, he is the Bible's ultimate Machiavellian."  
—USA Today

"Rich and imaginative. . .Thanks to Brooks, David is as compelling as he is contradictory, with the writing in The Secret Chord as lyrical as the lyre that David plays."
 —The Minneapolis Star Tribune

"Deeply sympathetic. . .Brooks offers new perspectives on a character whose story has captured the Western imagination for millennia. . .she breaks from the biblical version by giving voice to the voiceless women in David's life:  wives and lovers, a daughter, a mother -- the beloved and the scorned."
—The Chicago Tribune
 
"A compelling read, contemporary in its relevance. . .The Secret Chord is powerful storytelling, its landscape and time evoked in lyrical prose." 
—The Guardian
 
"The best historical fiction. . .Brooks gives the whole king his due. . .It's a tall order to breathe life into such a human being, and she manages it admirably."                                            -—NPR

"In The Secret Chord, Brooks does what she does best: bring psychological realism and dramatic arc to a subject we scantly know from history and myth. . .The result yields a gripping tale of a ruler's stresses and sacrifices, his triumphs and shames.  The Secret Chord reads like a Shakespeare history play with a dash of Machiavelli."
—The Dallas Morning News
                                                            
"[A] deeply imaginative exploration of this once powerful but deeply flawed ruler. . .Brooks is a gifted, engrossing storyteller.  Like March and People of the Book, The Secret Chord is studded with action, interesting characters, sweeping timelines and moving scenes filled with drama and conflict. . .a timely and universal exploration of the limits of loyalty, the seductive and corrupting influence of power, and the intersections between sin and faith, punishment and redemption."
—The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
                                                         
"George R.R. Martin's got nothing on the biblical chroniclers of David, kind of Israel.  Incest? Treachery and murder?  Marriages for love and political alliance?  This is the original Game of Thrones. . .Each of the members of David's court comes into sharp relief."
—The Miami Herald                                                               

"Like her beautiful descriptions of David as worshipful musician, Brooks' surface details befit the ancient story. Her delicate rendering of the spare, sun-pierced land is a painful foreshadowing of its still-embattled importance." 
—Philadelphia Inquirer

 "The Pulitzer-Prize winning author has succeeded in humanizing a mythic figure, breathing life, emotion, and literary resonance into a midrash that transforms David the King into David the Man."                                                                               
—Haaretz.com

"In her gorgeously written novel of ambition, courage, retribution, and triumph, Brooks imagines the life and character of King David in all his complexity. . .The language, clear and precise throughout, turns soaringly poetic when describing music or the glory of David's city. . .taken as a whole, the novel feels simultaneously ancient, accessible, and timeless."
—ALA Booklist

Review Quote

Praise for The Secret Chord " The Secret Chord-- a

Excerpt from Book

T here was an almond blossom, yesterday. It had opened its pale petals on a twig of the bough that curls and twists up to my windowsill. This morning, the blossom is go≠ the paleness upon the twig is snow. It does one no good, in these hills, to set store by the earth''s steady warming. My body is as bent as that bough. The cold is an ache in my bones. I am sure that this year''s reaping will be the last that I see. I hope only for one more season of summer fruit, for the ease of the hot sun on my back, for ripe figs, warm from the tree, spilling their sweet nectar through these splayed fingers. I have come to love this plain house, here among the groves. I have laid my head down in many places--on greasy sheepskins at the edge of battlefields, under the black expanse of goat hair tents, on the cold stone of caves and on the scented linens of palaces. But this is the only home that has been my own. They are at work, already, on Har Moriah. From across the wadi, I can hear the thin squeal of the planes scraping upon the logs. Hard work to get these trees here; felled in the forests of the Lebanon, lashed together into rafts, floated south on the sea, dragged up from the coast by oxen. Now the tang of cut cedar perfumes the air. Soon, the king will come, as he does every morning, to inspect the progress of the work. I know when he arrives by the cheers of the men. Even conscripted workers and slaves call out in praise of him, because he treats them fairly and honors their skill. I close my eyes, and imagine how it will be, when the walls have risen from the foundations of dressed stone: the vast pillars carved with lilies and pomegranates, sunlight glinting on cladding of gold . . . It is the only way I will ever see it: these pictures in my mind''s eye. I will not live to make the ascent up the broad stairs, to stand within the gilded precincts as the scent of burning fat and incense rises to the sky. It is well. I would not wish to go without him. I thought, at one time, that we would go together. I can still see his eyes, bright with the joy of creation, as he chose and planned what materials, what embellishments, pacing the floor, throwing his arms up and shaping the pillars as he envisioned them, his long fingers carving the air. But that was before I had to tell him that he would never build the temple. Before I had to tell him that all his killing--the very blood that, one might say, slakes the mortar of those foundation stones--had stained him too deeply. Strange words, you might think, to come from the selfsame source that had required these killings of him. Hard words, like blows. The blast from heaven, issuing from my mouth. Words born of thoughts I had not had, delivered with anger I did not feel, spilling out in a voice I did not even know for my own. Words whose reason no human heart could fathom. Civilization is built upon the backs of men like him, whose blood and sweat make it possible. But comes the peace, and the civil world has scant place for such men. It fell to me to tell him so. And like all such words that have formed upon my lips, these have become true in fact. It has come to be just as the voice said it would: this one dear ambition denied him. A bequest, instead, to his heir. In this, I am more fortunate than he. I have lived to complete my life''s great work. I have rolled and tied the scrolls with my own hands, sealed them with wax, secured them in clay vessels, and seen to their placement in the high, dry caves where I played as a child. In the nights, which have become so long for me, I think of those scrolls, and I feel a measure of peace. I remember it all so clearly, that day, at the turn of the year, the month when kings go out to battle. How warily I broached the matter. It might seem odd to say so, as my whole life in his service had been bent to this purpose: the speaking of truth, welcome or no. But it is one thing to transmit the divine through a blasting storm of holy noise, another thing entirely to write a history forged from human voices, imperfect memories, self-interested accounts. I have set it all down, first and last, the light and the dark. Because of my work, he will live. And not just as a legend lives, a safe tale for the fireside, fit for the ears of the young. Nothing about him ever was safe. Because of me, he will live in death as he did in life: a man who dwelt in the searing glance of the divine, but who sweated and stank, rutted without restraint, butchered the innocent, betrayed those most loyal to him. Who loved hugely, and was kind; who listened to brutal truth and honored the truth teller; who flayed himself for his wrongdoing; who built a nation, made music that pleased heaven and left poems in our mouths that will be spoken by people yet unborn. I have had a great length of days, and been many things. A reluctant warrior. A servant, a counselor. Sometimes, perhaps, his friend. And this, also, have I been: a hollow reed through which the breath of truth sounded its discordant notes. Words. Words upon the wind. What will endure, perhaps, is what I have written. If so, it is enough. I A man alone in a room. Not such an extraordinary thing. Yet as I stepped into the chamber I had a sense of something out of place. My eye traveled around the space, the woven pillows, the low tables set with sweating ewers of cool water . . . all was in order, yet something was not right. Then I grasped it. It had been a while since I had found him in a room by himself. For a long time, it seemed, he had moved in a press of people: members of his household, the men of his army, his sons, servants, sycophants. He stood by the open window, his back to me. From my place by the door I could not see what he saw, but the sounds made plain enough what held his gaze: the snap of banners in the breeze, the stamp of hooves, the wince and grind of iron on stone. And woven among these, like a bright thread through homespun, the sudden excited shouts of little boys. For them, born in the years of victory, muster for war was cause for uncomplicated joy. I knew that giddy thrill. I had been such a boy myself, once. When he, little more than a youth, led the band that sacked my village. His fists, balled tight, were planted on the wide sill of the window embrasure, his arms encircled by polished copper cuffs. His hair, the same color as the copper, was undressed, and fell in a dense mane against the fine black wool of his mantle. The cuffs glinted in the low slant of early light as his arm muscles flexed. He was clenched from head to foot. I am not a coward. Being in his service does not allow for it. My life, at certain times, has required me to draw upon deep wells of courage, and I am glad to say that I have never yet come up dry. But as I have resolved to set down a full account here, so I must begin with an honest accounting of myself. That morning, I was afraid. I had been summoned from my bed when it was still full dark, and though my slave, when he called me, had thought to bring a tray of warm bread fresh from the ovens, I had not touched it. Now, my empty stomach churned. Sound carries, at that hour, and as I waited in the anteroom, even the heavy cedar door could not muffle the angry voices within. When Yoav exited the room, he burst through the door so abruptly that the young guard barely had time to come to attention, the butt of his spear striking the stone floor a few seconds after his general had already swept past him. Yoav''s lips were drawn thin as a sheet of linen, his skin as pallid. He paused for a moment, fiddling with a strap on his greaves. His hand, which I saw was trembling slightly, could not manage the buckle. I have known Yoav since I was a child and he a youth thinking to kill me. I have seen him outnumbered on the battlefield and watched him run a man through at close quarters. I have seen him stand accused of murder, awaiting a death sentence. But never before had I seen his hand shake. He saw that I noticed, and he scowled. "Go in," he said tersely. "He wants you." Then, as I edged past him: "Take care. He is in a rage. His mood is foul." The guard opened the door for me, looking to neither right nor left as I passed from the anteroom to the inner chamber. I stood, just inside, waiting for acknowledgment. After a time, unsure if he knew that I was there, I cleared my throat. Still he did not turn. I held myself motionless, my gaze on the yellow shaft of sunlight widening upon the flagstones. Although it was early, the room was warming. Soon enough, it would be hot. I felt a bead of sweat forming on my brow. Suddenly, he opened his fists, reached for the shutters, and slammed them shut. He turned, his light mantle swinging. I, who had served him for years, was used to that face, its grave beauty, the bright glance that could kindle love or fear. But the expression was not the one I had expected. Yoav was son of the king''s older sister; they had become men together. He knew David as well as anyone alive. Yoav had said anger, and anger was there, but I could tell he had not read his uncle in full. Anger was there, but not anger only. The tense set of David''s body showed will at work, containing wrath, but also grief. The glint in his eye was, I believe, a tear. "What is the profit of being an anointed king, Natan, if I am to be confined here like a prisoner?" "Your generals act only out of love for you--" His hand spliced the air. "They act out of fear." He had never been a man for platitude. "Love?" He spat the word. "There is no love in this. This is fear and mistrust. And for what? The lapse of a moment, merely. How many wars have we made together? You

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