Murderer, rapist, adulterer and tyrant are not the usual Sunday School epithets attributed to David, the shepherd boy from the Bible who slew the Philistine giant, Goliath, and grew up to become King of Israel.

David the youth has become a metaphor for improbable victory, but the real story, as revealed in the books of Samuel, is of a flawed adult whose lust for power and beautiful women (and men) led to the devastation of his family and a remorseful end.

Realising that a drama with such intrigue and misadventure is a gift for a novelist, Geraldine Brooks, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Australian journalist-turned-author, has fleshed out this biblical story in her latest novel The Secret Chord.

Set 1000 years before Christ, Brooks' story reimagines David's life as told through the voice of his prophet, Natan.

Using the spellings from the Hebrew in the Tanakh, the Jewish sacred text -  so Nathan is Natan, Saul is Shaul, Solomon is Shlomo, etc - Brooks allows Natan, and his divine visions, to create a portrait of a king from Natan's talks with key figures who know David.

Each perspective adds to the whole and includes Shaul, the first king of a united Israel and Judah, David's wives Avigail (Abigail), Mikhal (Michal) and Batsheva (Bathsheba), the mother of David's youngest son, Shlomo (who succeeds David as king), and Natan himself.

The title of the novel alludes to David's famous love of the harp and the idea came to Brooks when she was at her eldest son Nathaniel's bar mitzvah seven years ago.

Nathaniel had taken up the harp and played a beautiful arrangement of the Leonard Cohen song Hallelujah. Brooks owes the inspiration for the book and the title to Nathaniel and dedicates the novel to him.

"David had crossed my horizon many times, either in those execrable movies like that Richard Gere debacle or in the cliches – you know, a day doesn't go by when there hasn't been a David and Goliath battle," says Brooks, a former Catholic who converted to Judaism in 1984 after marrying the American author Tony Horwitz​.

During the bar mitzvah, Brooks picked up a Jewish text, the Humash, and began reading the David story.

"The reading that woke me up to the fact that there was much more to David's story than I knew was the haftarah dealing with the death-bed power-plays engineered by Natan," she says. "It's a brilliant scene, rich with tension and suspense.

"As David lies dying at the end of his long life, David's eldest surviving son is trying to steal the throne out from under him. Instead, David's long-time adviser and sometime critic Natan conspires with Batsheva to thwart the plot and get David to name her son, Solomon, king instead. It's very Game of Thrones."

Brooks' David is a complex, morally conflicted man whose triumphs as king are equally matched by his failings as husband and father.

His lust for Batsheva, as with other women, clouds his judgment, leading to his arranged killing of her husband, Uriah, and igniting a series of divine punishments.

Brooks often weaves feminist themes into her stories and a common thread in The Secret Chord is the plight of women, culminating in a single act of brutality, the rape of David's daughter, Tamar, by her sadistic half-brother Amnon.

And what does David do about this terrible crime? Nothing, because he loves his son.

The Bible struck Brooks as a "blokey thing" in which females are lucky even to be named, and she has Mikhal ask of women, "Which of them has ever been mistress of her own destiny?"

Mikhal tells Natan that it's always the man whose love is thought worthy of recording in history, and she also reveals how David loved her brother, Yonatan (Jonathan). "He asked me to do things in the dark that recalled my brother to him," Mikhal says in the novel.

The portrait of the arc of the marriage between David and Mikhal is one of Brooks' favourite parts of the story, because the emotions are so recognisable. "I loved that it starts with the line that 'Mikhal loved David', because women had little agency in these stories."

Brooks, who turned 60 in September, is a petite woman with an infectious laugh.

She lives in a 17th-century millhouse on 2.5 hectares on Martha's Vineyard, an island off Massachusetts, with Horwitz and their two sons, the youngest of whom, Bizuayehu, they adopted seven years ago in Ethiopia when he was five.

They grow organic vegetables and have two dogs, Milo, an Australian kelpie, and Simba, a Sydney silky pomeranian cross that belonged to Brooks' mother, as well as a horse, Valentine, and three alpacas called Heathcliff, Monty and Alec Guinness.

Years ago, when they could lead a more flexible life, Brooks and Horwitz divided their time between the US and Sydney, where Nathaniel even went to school in Balmain. Now an American citizen, Brooks says she misses Australia enormously.

Brooks grew up in Ashfield with her older sister, the author Darleen Bungey​. Their mother's family members were Irish Catholics and Brooks attended Catholic schools, also studying art independently on Saturdays at Piux X College in Chatswood with "an amazing art teacher", Brother McDonald.

"I was lucky to have some really wonderful teachers, quite feminist in their views of women's education and progressive about social justice. They set me on fire intellectually."

Brooks' father Lawrie was a Californian singer who was stranded on tour in Australia in 1938 after his manager absconded with the band's wages. He stayed and served in the Australian army during World War II "to give it to the Nazis", and later became a newspaper proofreader.

Her mother Gloria, who died last year, was a radio presenter and publicist who fed her daughters' imaginations.

After studying fine arts and government at Sydney University, Brooks began her career as a journalist on The Sydney Morning Herald. She moved to New York on a scholarship and in 1983 completed a Masters degree in journalism. The following year she married Horwitz and became a correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, covering wars in Africa, former Yugoslavia and the Middle East.

After the birth of her first child, however, Brooks changed career course. She wrote two non-fiction books that drew from her journalism experience and then made the risky transition to fiction writing.

"I knew I could not keep being a foreign correspondent, and I thought I'd get an assignment lounging around a swimming pool with George Clooney or something similar, but no one wanted me for that," she says, bursting into laughter.

Brooks' second book, Foreign Correspondence, won the Australian Kibble Award for women's writing, which came with $20,000. She used the money to take time to write her first novel, Year of Wonders, about a 17th-century woman's battle to save her family from bubonic plague.

After finishing her second novel, March, a retelling of the life of the father in Louisa May Alcott's Little Women, she was successfully treated for breast cancer in 2004, and the book built her reputation by winning the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2006.

All Brooks' novels are retellings of the past in which the role of faith figures prominently.

Her third novel, People of the Book, was based partly on her experiences in Sarajevo, where she heard about the disappearance from the bombed museum of the Haggadah, an ancient Jewish text.

Her fourth novel, Caleb's Crossing, was inspired by the life of a Wampanoag convert to Christianity in the 17th century who was the first Native American to graduate from Harvard.

"If you are writing about history, it is hard to sidestep faith," she says.

"I think my interest in it comes from having worked as a foreign correspondent in countries that were shaped and distorted by strong beliefs."

Brooks' own decision to become a Jew was more to do with history than religion.

"Tony was baffled," she says, laughing at the suggestion her husband might have influenced her. "He's an atheist and very secular."

Since Jewishness is based on matrilineal descent, Brooks converted so their children could be Jewish.

Horwitz's ancestors had survived the pogroms in Russia and she didn't want to be the end of that line. "And I kind of wanted to give the finger to Hitler in a way," she says, laughing again.

Brooks admits she is not an observant Jew. Attending her local synagogue is really about witnessing the struggle of human beings to make sense of life, she says.

"In as far as we are observant, it has to do a lot with food and appreciating it. Like you bless the food and you bless the wine. And you notice the small good things."

Many prayers in Judaism are about noticing simple things, such as a new moon or dew on the grass, and being grateful for them, she says.

"I like that mindfulness. I am not a deist. A brush with cancer didn't make me one. I am a here-and-now kind of person and I think Judaism allows for that."

And Another Thing: Brooks' research trip to Israel included a stint herding sheep in the Judaean Desert. While David had lions to contend with, Brooks had Uzi fire in a nearby army rifle range.

The Secret Chord is published by Hachette Australia, $39.99. Buy now on Booktopia. Geraldine Brooks will speak at a Sydney Writers' Festival event at the Seymour Centre on November 9.