Her children thinks she talks to ghosts. 'And in a way I do,' admits Geraldine Brooks, whose uncanny ability to give voice to the past in her fiction has won her the Pulitzer Prize and a global readership in the millions. A single shard of historical fact, a well-worn artefact, or as in the case of her most recent best-seller, People of the Book, a bar room rumour, can set her off into the archives to coax compelling fiction from the seams of history in ways that seem almost miraculous to fans and critics alike.
'I always have these ideas stacked up like aeroplanes with air-traffic control,' laughs Brooks. 'I just keep coming across these things on the historical records that are fascinating, and noodle away at them until I start hearing the people talking to me, and then I know it's time to do that one.'
Her new and fourth novel, Caleb's Crossing, she explains, was already crowding her consciousness well before she'd completed People of the Book. It tells the little known story of Caleb Cheeshahteaumauk, the first Native American to graduate from Harvard University in 1665, but for Brooks it began with a single, six-word notation on a map. The map was of Martha's Vineyard, where the Australian-born author now lives, and on it were notations of sites of significance to the Wampanoag Indians who have inhabited the island for centuries.
'One of the notations said 'first Native American graduate of Harvard', and when I saw the year 1665 I thought it was a misprint,' recalls Brooks. 'I thought they meant 1965, civil rights time and all that.' But when she discovered that the graduation had actually taken place in the 1660s, 'I was basically a done dinner from that minute on,' she says.
Brooks spent the next few years scouring Harvard's archives, visiting archaeological digs and meeting with the Wampanoag Indians on Martha's Vineyard to learn as much as she could about Caleb and the time and place in which he lived. Little is known of this extraordinary scholar who was the son of a Wampanaog sonquem, or leader, and who studied the classics alongside the sons of the American colonial elite.
'Here's a boy who grew up, we can be fairly certain, totally immersed in his own culture and language then moved into the English world and became one of the most eminent scholars within it,' says Brooks, who also discovered another Wampanoag scholar, Joel, who'd studied alongside Caleb. 'There was tragic misadventure and murder before he graduated and then Caleb went on to graduate alone. But it must have been an astonishing thing to have made such a complete transition. It's an amazing achievement.'
Almost as astonishing is the way in which Brooks gives Caleb's story an imaginative voice in the aptly named Caleb's Crossing.