People of the Book [Hardcover]

Geraldine Brooks (Author)

Book Description

Release date: January 1, 2008

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From the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of March, the journey of a rare illuminated manuscript through centuries of exile and war

In 1996, Hanna Heath, an Australian rare-book expert, is offered the job of a lifetime: analysis and conservation of the famed Sarajevo Haggadah, which has been rescued from Serb shelling during the Bosnian war. Priceless and beautiful, the book is one of the earliest Jewish volumes ever to be illuminated with images. When Hanna, a caustic loner with a passion for her work, discovers a series of tiny artifacts in its ancient binding—an insect wing fragment, wine stains, salt crystals, a white hair—she begins to unlock the book’s mysteries. The reader is ushered into an exquisitely detailed and atmospheric past, tracing the book’s journey from its salvation back to its creation.

In Bosnia during World War II, a Muslim risks his life to protect it from the Nazis. In the hedonistic salons of fin-de-siècle Vienna, the book becomes a pawn in the struggle against the city’s rising anti-Semitism. In inquisition-era Venice, a Catholic priest saves it from burning. In Barcelona in 1492, the scribe who wrote the text sees his family destroyed by the agonies of enforced exile. And in Seville in 1480, the reason for the Haggadah’s extraordinary illuminations is finally disclosed. Hanna’s investigation unexpectedly plunges her into the intrigues of fine art forgers and ultra-nationalist fanatics. Her experiences will test her belief in herself and the man she has come to love.

Inspired by a true story, People of the Book is at once a novel of sweeping historical grandeur and intimate emotional intensity, an ambitious, electrifying work by an acclaimed and beloved author.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Amazon Best of the Month, January 2008: One of the earliest Jewish religious volumes to be illuminated with images, the Sarajevo Haggadah survived centuries of purges and wars thanks to people of all faiths who risked their lives to safeguard it. Geraldine Brooks, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of March, has turned the intriguing but sparely detailed history of this precious volume into an emotionally rich, thrilling fictionalization that retraces its turbulent journey. In the hands of Hanna Heath, an impassioned rare-book expert restoring the manuscript in 1996 Sarajevo, it yields clues to its guardians and whereabouts: an insect wing, a wine stain, salt crystals, and a white hair. While readers experience crucial moments in the book's history through a series of fascinating, fleshed-out short stories, Hanna pursues its secrets scientifically, and finds that some interests will still risk everything in the name of protecting this treasure. A complex love story, thrilling mystery, vivid history lesson, and celebration of the enduring power of ideas, People of the Book will surely be hailed as one of the best of 2008. --Mari Malcolm

From Publishers Weekly

Reading Geraldine Brooks's remarkable debut novel, Year of Wonders, or more recently March, which won the Pulitzer Prize, it would be easy to forget that she grew up in Australia and worked as a journalist. Now in her dazzling new novel, People of the Book, Brooks allows both her native land and current events to play a larger role while still continuing to mine the historical material that speaks so ardently to her imagination. Late one night in the city of Sydney, Hanna Heath, a rare book conservator, gets a phone call. The Sarajevo Haggadah, which disappeared during the siege in 1992, has been found, and Hanna has been invited by the U.N. to report on its condition. Missing documents and art works (as Dan Brown and Lev Grossman, among others, have demonstrated) are endlessly appealing, and from this inviting premise Brooks spins her story in two directions. In the present, we follow the resolutely independent Hanna through her thrilling first encounter with the beautifully illustrated codex and her discovery of the tiny signs-a white hair, an insect wing, missing clasps, a drop of salt, a wine stain-that will help her to discover its provenance. Along with the book she also meets its savior, a Muslim librarian named Karaman. Their romance offers both predictable pleasures and genuine surprises, as does the other main relationship in Hanna's life: her fraught connection with her mother. In the other strand of the narrative we learn, moving backward through time, how the codex came to be lost and found, and made. From the opening section, set in Sarajevo in 1940, to the final section, set in Seville in 1480, these narratives show Brooks writing at her very best. With equal authority she depicts the struggles of a young girl to escape the Nazis, a duel of wits between an inquisitor and a rabbi living in the Venice ghetto, and a girl's passionate relationship with her mistress in a harem. Like the illustrations in the Haggadah, each of these sections transports the reader to a fully realized, vividly peopled world. And each gives a glimpse of both the long history of anti-Semitism and of the struggle of women toward the independence that Hanna, despite her mother's lectures, tends to take for granted. Brooks is too good a novelist to belabor her political messages, but her depiction of the Haggadah bringing together Jews, Christians and Muslims could not be more timely. Her gift for storytelling, happily, is timeless. Copyright 2007 Publishers Weekly.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 372 pages
• Publisher: The Viking Press; 1st edition (January 1, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 067001821X
• ISBN-13: 978-0670018215
• Product Dimensions: 6.3 x 1.2 x 9.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (485 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #276,246 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Geraldine Brooks is the author of the novels Caleb's Crossing, People of the Book, March (which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2006) and Year of Wonders. She has also written two works of non-fiction: Nine Parts of Desire, based on her experiences among Muslim women in the mideast, and Foreign Correspondence, a quirky memoir about an Australian childhood enriched by penpals around the world and her adult quest to find them. Brooks started out as a reporter in her hometown, Sydney, and went on to cover conflicts as a Wall Street Journal correspondent in Bosnia, Somalia, and the Middle East. She now lives on Martha's Vineyard in Massachusetts with her husband Tony Horwitz, two sons, a horse named Butter and a dog named Milo.

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#61 in Books > Literature & Fiction > Genre Fiction > Historical

#61 in Books > Literature & Fiction > Genre Fiction > Historical

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

224 of 234 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars No spoilers here January 6, 2008

By ash

Format:Hardcover

Id been waiting for this book since I read the excerpt in the New Yorker last month. It didn't disappoint. The vignettes of each time period were expertly done, all of the characters well drawn, the history as timely as today. The love of books, history, art come through very well through the entire book. The horrors of the past and how they keep repeating themselves was very well expressed without being hammered into the reader. Given my track record with this author (I didn't care for her other two fiction books, tho I do love her non fiction), I was very very impressed.

Two things that are keeping this from being a five star for me. There was too much about Hanna. Her character obviously is important, but the whole love affair, her problems with her mother, all of that could easily have been taken out. And that last chapter sounded like something from a Mission Impossible movie, and was totally unnecessary.

The other thing was the ommission of Leila's meeting with Sula's son, in Israel. This is described in the article but for some reason was left out of the book. Its a beautiful and moving moment, and needed to be there.

That being said, I'd recommend this book to anyone looking for an excellent read.

433 of 465 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars "Book burnings. Always the forerunners. Heralds of the stake, the ovens, the mass graves." January 1, 2008

By Luan Gaines HALL OF FAMETOP 500 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover

In 1996, as rare book expert Dr. Hanna Heath examines the Sarajevo Haggadah, an illuminated Hebrew manuscript from 15th century Spain, she carefully removes a series of artifacts that, under laboratory examination, will offer insight into the remarkable journey of this unusual text. Having survived the Serb-Bosnian war, the haggadah yields precious clues that allow Hanna to reconstruct the attrition of time: the fragment of an insect wing, an apparent wine stain, a white hair, salt crystals. It requires all of Heath's considerable skills to trace the evidence through the centuries to the book's origin. One of the earliest illuminated Hebrew books to feature figurative art, this haggadah has been repressed by medieval Jews for religious concerns. Perhaps made in mid-4th century Spain, when Jews, Christian and Muslims peacefully coexisted, the manuscript begins its troubled journey in the Spanish Inquisition and expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492.

An Australian, Dr. Heath embraces the acerbic wit of her culture, clumsy at the communication skills so easily wielded by others; of a more contemplative nature, she is devoted to the historic value of the volumes she restores. Troubled by a chronic antagonism with her neurosurgeon mother, the young woman has built a life around her work in compensation. Meanwhile, Hannah's romantic curiosity is piqued by the enigmatic man assisting her at the museum in Sarajevo, widower Dr. Ozrem Karaman, his infant son profoundly brain-injured and wife killed in the war's crossfire. Her emotions in turmoil, Hanna's natural impulse is to soothe Ozrem's pain; unfortunately, she cannot forestall the inevitable or alter fate. Hannah turns to her work- for Hanna, books speak to objectifiable history, while feelings are impossible to confine.

The human component of the book's journey brings a particular poignancy to this novel, Hanna's obsession with ancient texts, Ozrem's tragic loss, the passage of the haggadah from hand to hand through years of religious strife, the thoughtful preservation of history's great treasures. The actions of years past speak to the present, a haunting reminder of man's inclination to destroy that which he does not understand.

Extraordinary people drive the story, from Sarajevo to Vienna to Boston, an intense investigation via scientific methods of chaotic times, religious and political unrest. Each era is revealed through the actions of characters circa 1940, 1894 and 1609, the journey of the haggadah and its protectors, the book hidden from those who would obliterate an invaluable artifact: "To be a human being matters more than to be a Jew, a Muslim, Catholic or Orthodox." Time's guardians reach through the years to pass the haggadah from one century to another. Hannah's task is to overcome personal defeats, trust her instincts and evaluate the evidence, so that a new generation may learn from the courage of the old. Luan Gaines/ 2007.

213 of 234 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars "A book is more than the sum of its materials. It is an artifact of the human mind and hand." December 31, 2007

By E. Bukowsky HALL OF FAMETOP 50 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover

"The People of the Book," by Geraldine Brooks, opens in Sarajevo in 1996. Under the watchful eyes of bank security guards, Bosnian police officers, two United Nations peacekeepers, and an official UN observer, a thirty-year-old Aussie named Hanna Heath has been hired to perform an exacting task. She is about to examine a precious fifteenth century codex, the Sarajevo Haggadah, "one of the rarest and most mysterious volumes in the world." Hanna's impressive qualifications include honors degrees in chemistry and Near Eastern languages as well as a PhD in fine art conservation, which as she patiently explains, is very different from book restoration. She knows her materials intimately: calf's intestine, pigments, gold leaf, and parchment are some of the tools of her trade. The Haggadah, which was created in medieval Spain, is "a lavishly illuminated Hebrew manuscript made at a time when Jewish belief was firmly against illustrations of any kind."

The book first came to light in 1894. After passing through many hands, it disappeared in 1992, when the Sarajevo siege began. After four years, it suddenly reappears and an Israeli expert, Amitai Yomtov, awakens Hannah at two o'clock in the morning to tell her the exciting news. Most scholars believed that the book had been stolen or destroyed during the fighting. It turns out that the head of the museum library in Sarajevo, Ozren Karaman, placed the Haggadah in a safe-deposit box for safekeeping. "Can you imagine, Channah?" Amitai exclaims. "A Muslim, risking his neck to save a Jewish book." Now, UN officials want an expert to inspect the Haggadah for signs of damage.

Although she is technically proficient and has written many highly-regarded papers in her field, Hanna brings something extra to the table. "It has to do with an intuition about the past. By linking research and imagination, sometimes I can think myself into the heads of the people who made the book." Indeed that is exactly what Brooks does in this meticulously crafted work, with its beautifully realized, three-dimensional cast of characters and its compelling and richly textured plot. As Hanna delves into the history of a priceless text, the reader is transported to 1940 Sarajevo, 1894 Vienna, 1609 Venice, 1492 Tarragona, and 1480 Seville. Along the way, we gain insight into the political, religious, and social turmoil that has beset the Jewish people over the centuries.

The author alternates chapters set in 1996 with those that take place further back in the past. As the story progresses, we come ever closer to the secret of who created this magnificent work of art. The journey is all the more wonderful because of the people who accompany us: Lola is a Sarajevan Jew who joins the partisans during World War II; destiny brings her to an Albanian scholar who will protect both her and the Haggadah from the Nazis. In Venice, we meet a bitter and sick Austrian bookbinder, Herr Florien Mittl. Ironically, this virulent anti-Semite is entrusted with the painstaking job of rebinding the Haggadah. In Venice, an alcoholic priest named Giovanni Domenico Vistorini is a censor of the Inquisitor. He may allow the Haggadah to "pass" or declare it a work of heresy and consign it to the flames. David Ben Shoushan, a poor Hebrew scribe in Tarragona, Spain, fills his mind with holy letters as he prepares to make his own vital contribution to the Haggadah. The final pieces of the puzzle fall into place in Seville, Spain, at the time of the Jews' expulsion.

Against the backdrop of these tumultuous historical events, we observe the vitriolic Hanna soften, mature, and fall in love with Ozran Karaman, whose hidden grief after suffering a series of tragedies may prevent him from reciprocating her affection. An irritated Hanna repeatedly clashes with her aloof and disapproving mother, a highly respected neurosurgeon who has always belittled her daughter's work. In the book's one misstep, the author allows a bit of melodrama to taint her otherwise impeccable narrative when the protagonist uncovers some startling truths about her identity.

Geraldine Brooks shows how the Haggadah's fate illuminates the prejudice and mindless persecution that have too often poisoned communities and nations throughout the world. Ozren wonders why more people do not realize "that to be a human being matters more than to be Jew or a Muslim, [or a] Catholic." This is an engrossing, poignant, and skillfully constructed novel. It is a marvel of storytelling at its best.