People of the Book - by Geraldine Brooks (Paperback)

About the Book

Hanna Heath, an Australian rare-book expert, is offered the job of a lifetime: analysis and conservation of the famous Sarajevo Haggadah, which was rescued during the Bosnian war. When Hanna discovers a series of tiny artifacts in the book's ancient binding, she begins to unlock its mysteries.

Book Synopsis

The bestselling novel that follows a rare manuscript through centuries of exile and war, from the author of The Secret Chord and of March, winner of the Pulitzer Prize.

Inspired by a true story, People of the Book is a novel of sweeping historical grandeur and intimate emotional intensity by an acclaimed and beloved author. Called "a tour de force" by the San Francisco Chronicle, this ambitious, electrifying work traces the harrowing journey of the famed Sarajevo Haggadah, a beautifully illuminated Hebrew manuscript created in fifteenth-century Spain. When it falls to Hanna Heath, an Australian rare-book expert, to conserve this priceless work, the series of tiny artifacts she discovers in its ancient binding--an insect wing fragment, wine stains, salt crystals, a white hair--only begin to unlock its deep mysteries and unexpectedly plunges Hanna into the intrigues of fine art forgers and ultranationalist fanatics.

Review Quotes

Praise for People of the Book

"There's romance between Brooks and the world, and her writing is as full of heart and curiosity as it is intelligence and judgement."
--The Boston Globe

"Intelligent, thoughtful, gracefully written, and original . . . Brooks tells a believable and engaging story."
--The Washington Post

"Intense, gripping . . . People of the Book, like her Pulitzer Prize-winning previous novel March, is a tour de force that delivers a reverberating lesson gleaned from history. . . . It's a brilliant, innately suspenseful structure, and one that allows Brooks to show off her remarkable aptitude for assimilating research and conveying a wide range of settings. Also on full display is her keen sense of dramatic pacing."
--San Francisco Chronicle

"[A] marvelously intertwined narrative, with one strand tied to the contemporary world and the other leading us back into European history, into wars and inquisitions and family tragedies, all of this making up avidly narrated, powerfully emotional quest."
--The Dallas Morning News

"Richly imagined and at times almost unbearably exciting. . . . An ambitious book, a pleasure to read, and wholly successful in its attempt to give a sense of how miraculous, unlikely, and ultimately binding the history of objects can be."
--Star Tribune (Minneapolis)

About the Author

Geraldine Brooks is the author of four novels, the Pulitzer Prize-winning March and the international bestsellers Caleb's Crossing, People of the Book, and Year of Wonders. She has also written the acclaimed nonfiction works Nine Parts of Desire and Foreign Correspondence. Her most recent novel, Caleb's Crossing, was the winner of the New England Book Award for Fiction and the Christianity Today Book Award, and was a finalist for the Langum Prize in American Historical Fiction. Born and raised in Australia, she lives on Martha's Vineyard with her husband, the author Tony Horwitz.