Mary awards her prize

 I am just discovering Geraldine Brooks. She is a journalist, Australian by birth, and worked as Middle East Correspondant for the Wall St. Journal. I  bought and read her first book, Nine Parts of Desire when I was living in Egypt.  It is about the lives of women in that part of the world.  She has also written a book called Year of Wonder about a 17th century plague year through the eyes of a woman who lived through it, and also March, an imagined account of the life in the south of the US during our civil war in the 1860s.  March was the father of the , Little Women, book read by all American girls as they grew up.  None of those books is filled with life and laughter, but I am in awe of Geraldine Brooks' ability to recreate, so believably,the  the conditions of the times of which she writes.  are the basis of and  the social and scientific events which she so movingly describes.  She writes in a matter of fact fashion.  Her work is for me, very compelling.