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People of the Book: A Novel
by Geraldine Brooks
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About This Book
ISBN13: 9780670018215 |
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Powells.com Staff Pick
Give me a mystery (one that is structured around an antiquarian book, no less!), a historical setting, and an exquisite writer like Geraldine Brooks, and I am suddenly avoiding daily rituals like sleep and food. Nothing could deter me from turning the pages of this fabulous, beautifully written book.
Recommended by Lorraine, Powells.com
Synopses & Reviews
Publisher Comments:
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.
Review:
"Signature Reviewed by Margot Livesey 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. Margot Livesey's The House on Fortune Street will be published by HarperCollins in May 2008." Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)
Review:
"[A]n ingenuity equal to that standing behind her Pultizer Prize-winning March....[A] marvelously evocative journey backward in time..." Booklist (Starred Review)
Review:
"[A]n enthralling historical mystery....Rich suspense based on a true-life literary puzzle, from the Pulitzer Prize-winning Brooks." Kirkus Reviews
Review:
"Each story is engrossing and deftly woven into the narrative, though the telling is sometimes facile or cloying. Nevertheless, this latest from Pulitzer Prize winner Brooks is a good addition to most libraries and excellent for discussion groups." Library Journal
Review:
"Brooks demonstrates a gift for balancing research with a command of pacing and plot....Geraldine Brooks has...half-found and half-invented a swashbuckling book and, despite occasional quirks, woven a tale that's haunting and satisfying." The Los Angeles Times
Review:
"[A] sprawling historical work — equal parts CSI, period piece and romance-among-the-ruins....This is exciting stuff...and Brooks does a good job moving the plot along....[A]n ambitious book, a pleasure to read, and wholly successful..." Minneapolis Star Tribune
Review:
"[I]ntense, gripping...a tour de force that delivers a reverberating lesson gleaned from history....In writing an immensely readable novel that fleshes out gaps in the historical record, Brooks has extended the reach of a story that bears recounting." San Francisco Chronicle
Review:
"Its accelerated suspense and twisty, sensational conclusion, though sure to please many readers, have a feature-film quality that undercuts somewhat the seriousness of the Haggadah story. It's a good try, but Brooks can't quite have it both ways." San Diego Union-Tribune
Review:
"Although People of the Book contains scads of beautiful writing, the overall work is uneven....Still, [it] is an ambitious effort filled with many fascinating historical details, characters and stories, and it's capable of casting a spell for many pages at a time." Rocky Mountain News
Synopsis:
From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of March comes this novel — inspired by a true story — that traces the journey of a rare illuminated manuscript through centuries of exile and war.
About the Author
Geraldine Brooks is the author of March, the recipient of the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction. She is also the author of Year of Wonders, Nine Parts of Desire, and Foreign Correspondence. Previously, Brooks was a correspondent for the Wall Street Journal in Bosnia, Somalia, and the Middle East. She lives with her husband, the author Tony Horwitz, and their son.
What Our Readers Are Saying
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Average customer rating based on 5 comments:
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CMKray, July 11, 2008 (view all comments by CMKray)
"The Red Violin" for book lovers. Excellently woven.
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Bonnie Palmer, May 2, 2008 (view all comments by Bonnie Palmer)
I would recommend this novel to the stout-hearted reader who is interested in the critical role books can play in the history of a people and in the darker side of European history. What I enjoyed most about "People of the Book" is its clever duel narrative structure: the framing story relates how the novel’s protagonist, a book conservator, attempts to piece together the history of a famous Jewish manuscript called the Sarajevo Haggadah, as well as telling her own story of the personal and professional crises that plague her as she works on the book’s conservation; meanwhile, a second set of chapters moves backward in time from the recovery in 1996 of the haggadah through it’s endurance over five centuries of religious strife to it’s unlikely inception as illuminations of the Passover story. It is this second narrative that really makes the work haunting because author Geraldine Brooks’ invented history for the manuscript is absolutely heartbreaking. The people who create and care for the book face imprisonment, torture, exile and ignominious death to insure its survival, taking the reader with them into the Nazi annexation of the Austrian Empire, the African diaspora and the Inquisitions of early modern Venice and Spain. Her descriptions of medieval waterboarding are particularly shocking and poignant today. The novelist’s point in guiding the reader on this grueling tour of European atrocities is to demonstrate that this unique illuminated haggadah was the product of moments in history that ever-so-briefly permitted the cultural coexistence of Jews, Muslims and Christians, periods which inexorably give way to repeated repressive regimes. As a student of early modern European history, I found this work gritty, thorough-going and challenging. If I have a complaint of this novel, it is that the author only hints at rather than depicts the craft of bookmaking in the various periods of history she explores. Overall I cannot say I loved this novel as much as I felt drawn into the narrator’s sometimes disturbing literary pursuits. The well-plotted tale of the haggadah becomes enthralling as the reader plunges further into its murky past, while the heroine’s story likewise becomes more compelling as the novel progresses and she must confront not just the challenges of an extraordinary book restoration, but must also come to terms with flaws in her own carefully-crafted identity as a conservator and an individual.
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Stephanie Hammerwold, February 25, 2008 (view all comments by Stephanie Hammerwold)
I picked up this book because I was intrigued by a novel about the lengths people have gone to in order to save a book. Being a book lover, I couldn't think of a more perfect topic! This book encompasses over 500 years of history and offers a fictional account of the real Sarajevo Haggadah. People of the Book shows the imprints left behind within the Haggadah are as much a part of the book's story as the illuminations and words that grace its pages.
View all 5 comments
Product Details
- ISBN:
- 9780670018215
- Author:
- Publisher:
- Viking Books
- Subject:
- Judaism
- Subject:
- Books
- Subject:
- Literary
- Subject:
- Children's 12-Up - Fiction - General
- Copyright:
- 2008
- Publication Date:
- January 2008
- Binding:
- Hardcover
- Grade Level:
- General/trade
- Language:
- English
- Pages:
- 372
- Dimensions:
- 9.52x6.30x1.22 in. 1.39 lbs.
