Product Description

From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of March, the journey of a rare illuminated prayer book through centuries of war, destruction, theft, loss, and love.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #56343 in Books
• Published on: 2008-01-01
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 384 pages

Amazon.ca
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 novels 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.

From AudioFile
Narrator Edwina Wren is an Australian, as are this book's author and its heroine, Hannah Heath. So that's a match. Hannah is flown to war-torn Sarajevo to restore an ancient, priceless Haggadah. The sacred manuscript has been sent like a cork down the bloody torrent of history. The story's characters and accents vary widely, and Wren rises magnificently to the challenge. The German officers don't just want the manuscript, they ³vont² it. ³Let me see your chewish manuscripts . . .² Wren's agile liquid voice is dipped in sugar. This too is a match, since the survival of the text is proof of the heroic ecumenism of book lovers. The opening inscription is from Henrich Heine: ³There, where one burns books, one in the end burns men.² B.H.C. © AudioFile 2008, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine

Customer Reviews

"I might as well say, it wasn't my usual kind of job"
In this grand saga of history, war and memory, author Geraldine Brooks follows the path of the world-famous Sarajevo Haggadah. Unique because of its extraordinarily rich illuminations, the manuscript came to represent all of the suffering of the Bosnian Jews, particularly throughout the twentieth century. Believed to have been created in 14th century Spain, there lies deep within the book's beautiful pages the standard elements of prayers, poems and stories about the Jews exodus from Egypt that traditionally guided Passover.

It is in 1996 when Australian rare books expert Hanna Heath is offered the job to inspect and conserve the manuscript's condition in the hope that it can be exhibited as soon as possible to raise the morale of war-torn Sarajevo. Known throughout the academic world for her research and frequently applauded for her experiences in book restoration, Hanna is an extremely ambitious individual and is well aware that this job is a once in a lifetime career-maker.

Encouraged by the goodwill of the United Nations, Hanna travels to Sarajevo in the hope she can make a good documentation of the book so the authorities can at least print a beautiful facsimile to present to the world. Even before the plane lands, Hannah sees the destructive results of the Bosnian war, this devastated city, passing in a blur of "shrapnel-splashed buildings," as the book, now placed in a safe-deposit box in the vault of the central bank, is possibly in danger of disintegrating.

Assisted by the librarian Ozren Karaman, the young chief of the National University of Bosnia, Hanna begins her analysis of the work. She observes that the soiled and scuffed binding is of an ordinary nineteenth century style and that the parchments are now bound in simple cardboard covers. The dark brown calfskin spine and corners have begun flaking away and there are also no clasps on the binding. Also, the book is in real danger of being exposed to the wild swings of the Sarajevan temperature.

The burnished gold of the illuminations, so fresh and so blazing suddenly overwhelm Hanna, along with the numerous miniature paintings created at a time when most Jews considered figurative art a violation of the commandments. But what is most fascinating about the work is the discovery of three items buried deep within the codex: a small piece of a butterfly wing, a red stain that at first glance looks to be wine, samples of what appears to be sea salt, and a fine white hair.

It is the unearthing of these pieces that jump-start Hanna's spellbinding journey into the dark secrets of the Haggadah, a volume with a turbulent history that has survived war and exodus and the evils of the Catholic Inquisition. Made when the vast Islamic empire was the bright light of the dark ages, the book existed at a time where science and poetry still flourished even as the Jews, tortured and killed by Christians, were hoping to find a measure of peace somewhere in the world.

As the history of this manuscript steadily unfolds, Hanna finds herself gradually drawn to the battered and beaten down Ozren. His child, once a victim of the war, is now lying in a local hospital with brain damage, any hope of reviving him a dream at best. But as Hanna urges Ozren to seek the help of Western doctors, she must also contend with the constant resentment of her ambitious mother, an accomplished neurosurgeon who is of the mind that Hanna has squandered her opportunity to enter a "real profession," instead wasting her life as a "tradeswoman."

Obviously Hanna's exploration of the Haggadah, her affair with Ozren, and her troubled relationship with her mother form the core of the novel, but the scattered history of the manuscript and its journey down through the ages also plays a critical part. Moving from Spain in the 1500's, to Venice in 1609, to 1894 Vienna, and onto Sarajevo in the midst of the 2nd World War, Brooks embellishes cultures that once influenced and enriched one another, but paid the ultimate price for turning to prejudice, intolerance and fear.

Indeed, the entire story of the Haggadah from its survival until today is a series of miracles: The young Jewish girl, who together with a Muslim librarian, endeavour to keep the book safe from the Nazis; a Viennese doctor whom the so-respectable bourgeoisie entrust to him the care of their private parts and the confidences of their lives; an alchoholic priest who works as sensor for the office of the Inquisitor of Venice, reading and passing judgement on the works of alien faiths; and a Jewish painter whose family is unwittingly caught up in the Spanish Inquisition as the government tries fanatically to purify the Church.

The Haggadah travels down through the ages, surviving these same human disasters over and over again, and finally tumbling into the arms of Hanna, where it reminds us of the fragility of the human condition and the terrible burdens of repression and tyanny.

Certainly the book provides an ultimate test of its owners, its beauty seducing Christians, Moslems and Jews alike as it is battled and fought over and finally secreted away at the end of the 20th century. Central to this beautifully realized story is its startling vision of tolerance, the Haggah remaining a fascinating symbol of human unity in an age where religious and cultural divisions continue to run deep. Michael Leonard January 2008.

`Too many books burned in the world'
This novel is a weaving of lives and events around a ancient Hebrew book: the Sarajevo Haggadah. The novel moves between the present, where Dr Hanna Heath is researching and restoring the Sarajevo Haggadah, and events and people specific to the creation and journey of the manuscript in the past. Along the way, the reader learns something of the creation of such manuscripts and of their restoration.

For me, the story of the book and the people associated with it in the past is far more interesting than the contemporary story of Dr Heath. This is an issue of personal taste rather than any lack of balance in the writing and, if anything, reflects how drawn I was to the travels and travails of this document.

Ultimately, this novel is a triumph. Although it is a work of fiction, Ms Brooks tells us that it is inspired by the true story of the Hebrew codex known as the Sarajevo Haggadah. The journeys undertaken by such books over the centuries, and their survival, is something to be marvelled at and thankful for.

Yes, this is truly a `gripping and moving novel about war, art, love and survival.'

Highly recommended.

Jennifer Cameron-Smith

An ambitious novel in which history and religion collide
This book centres around the real Sarajevo Haggadah, an illuminated fourteenth century text that visually celebrates Jewish Passover and Seder. The haggadah is permenantly on display in Sarajevo, and according to its Wikipedia page, is estimated to be one of the most valuable books in existence worth an estimated $700 million US dollars in 1991. This novel works backwards through history to try to piece together the stories of the people who made the book and saved the book from destruction during some of history's darkest and anti-Semitic times.

While it can be argued that Brooks' protagonist is Dr. Hanna Heath, an Australian book archivist who pieces the book's history together through a forsenic analysis of an insect wing, a red wine stain, a droplet of saltwater, and a white cat hair, I propose that the real protagonist of The People of the Book is the Sarajevo Haggadah itself. The most stunning and compelling parts of March's novel are the chapters based in historical fiction, including a World War II era Muslim librarian who risks his life for the haggadah, a nineteenth century Jewish doctor and his syphilis suffering Christian patient; an alcoholic Catholic priest and a gambling addicted rabbi in seventeenth century Venice; a Jewish family escaping the Spanish inquistion; and the Moor who is enslaved in Spain during the fourteenth century to create the haggadah at the request of a Muslim Emir.

What I loved about this book was the intersecting relationships between Jews, Muslims, and Christians. At times the stories of the people of the haggadah reflect the ethnic violence and hatred that has sadly plagued much of history. At other times, the characters surprise readers by overlooking their religious doctrines to help and support people of different faiths. I found this aspect of the novel, as well the stunningly well-researched historical and forsenic details, to be most satisfying and affirming.

Author Geraldine Brooks' afterword also makes for great reading. She explains that her novel is a fictional account of the Sarajevo Haggadah's journey throughout history, and she provides details about the real people and events who were the sources of inspiration for her novel.

The novel is lengthy, and the personal travails of Dr. Hanna Heath and her tumultuous relationships with her mother and past lovers is the weakest and least interesting part of the novel. However, the compelling and spectacular story of the Sarajevo Haggadah is what makes up the bulk of this novel, and is what makes the novel a major accomplishment for its author. Highly recommended. [Amy MacDougall]