Plucky Charms

Horwitz -- who would go on to become a Journal reporter and writer of books himself -- went with her. His take is a bit different. He mentions an early reporting moment he calls "emblematic of her style."

She'd been sent to cover the Palestinian intifada, he says, which erupted in late 1987, not long after they first arrived in the Middle East. As she drove alone through the West Bank, Palestinian boys started heaving rocks at her car.

Time for a U-turn, you might think. Instead, Horwitz says, Brooks "leaped out of the car and chased after her assailants so she could interview them."

Six intense years later, Brooks took a leave to write "Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of Islamic Women." Returning to the Journal, she jetted into war zones such as Bosnia and Somalia. In 1994, she flew to Nigeria to report on escalating conflict between the Ogoni people of the oil-rich Niger Delta and the not-so-savory Nigerian government, which had close ties to Royal Dutch Shell.

Then she disappeared.

Horwitz got a fax in the middle of the night informing him that his wife had last been seen going into a police station in Port Harcourt.

Brooks spent only a few days in jail. But it was long enough for her to think: "I'm 38 years old, I do really want to have a child. And if they keep me for two years" -- well, she might have blown her chance.

So she quit the paper, had the child -- and noticed that a strange thing had happened.

"I'd loved every step I took as a journalist," she says, but "I had no idea I'd been carrying around this incredible ball of stress. I used to get these piercing migraine headaches and I had this twitch in one eye that would come and go. I thought it was just who I was.

"The minute I quit journalism, that went away."

'A Very Happy Place'

Brooks got the idea for her first novel when she and Horwitz, based in London at the time, went for a hike in Derbyshire and "saw this little sign that said, 'Eyam -- Plague Village.' '' They learned that when the Black Death struck this community of 350 in 1665, the villagers voluntarily quarantined themselves to prevent its further spread. Fewer than a hundred survived.

"Year of Wonders" was her answer to the question: What must that have been like?

The idea for "March" came from Louisa May Alcott's children's classic, "Little Women," in which the father is largely absent because he's serving as a chaplain in the Civil War. What would happen, Brooks wondered, if she imagined the war from his point of view? Horwitz's obsession with that conflict, as he researched and wrote his 1998 bestseller "Confederates in the Attic," played its part as well: When "March" was published, in 2005, Brooks took the opportunity to "retract unreservedly my former characterization of my husband . . . as a Civil War bore."

Publication of "March" had to be delayed while Brooks dealt with breast cancer. There were two rounds of surgery, chemotherapy, radiation -- not fun, even for someone who characterizes herself as "on the sunny side of the spectrum." Still, within a year, "it was like it had never happened."

Then along came the Pulitzer, which gave her fiction-writing career a major boost.

Reviews of "People of the Book" have not been uniformly enthusiastic. The Washington Post's Jonathan Yardley praised it as "intelligent, thoughtful, gracefully written and original" and noted that it "resides comfortably . . . between popular fiction and literature." ("A very happy place, I think," Brooks says. "That's exactly where I'd like to be.") But the New York Times's Janet Maslin called it "schematic" and overburdened by research.

Writers are rarely impervious to criticism, but Brooks has a helpful way to keep it in perspective.

Ever since she took her fictional leap, she says, "everything that's happened has just so wildly exceeded my expectation." All she'd hoped was "to sell enough books to be able to continue to write."

That writing happens on Martha's Vineyard these days. She and Horwitz lived for many years in the village of Waterford, but they moved north a couple of years ago when Loudoun County started to feel too overdeveloped. Besides their 11-year-old son, Nathaniel, their household now includes three dogs, Brooks's mother, who has Alzheimer's, and her 20-something nephew.

"Did you see that movie 'Little Miss Sunshine'? It's just like that," Geraldine Brooks says -- and laughs and laughs and laughs.