Although she has written three books of nonfiction, Geraldine Brooks is best known as an author of historical fiction. But her brand of historical fiction has a way of enriching stories that are already familiar to readers, taking us along as she traces the spread of the bubonic plague to a small English village, or discovers the history of a 15th century Haggadah through the eyes of a book conservator, or as she follows the absent father in Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women to the battlefields