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People of the Book
Geraldine Brooks
#UB9652
Hardcover, 372 pages; 2008
$20.76
Geraldine Brooks's third novel aims unabashedly at book people. The story of the survival of the Sarajevo Haggadah, a fifteenth-century illuminated Jewish manuscript, is unraveled through a set of minuscule clues—an insect-wing fragment, wine stains, salt crystals, and a white hair—found in its pages. As Hanna Heath, an expert on and conservationist of rare books, discovers each clue, the novel flashes back to the related historical episode—the manuscript's creation in Seville in 1480, its escape from the Spanish Inquisition in 1690, and its endurance through the anti-Semitism of nineteenth-century Vienna, the Nazi invasion of Yugoslavia during WWII, and the shelling of Sarajevo's libraries in the 1990s. In this intriguing novel, the survival through the centuries of a Jewish religious text depends on the efforts of Christians and Muslims, as well as Jews, celebrating not just inter-religious toleration but a universal regard for sacred artifacts. Inspired by what is known about the actual Sarajevo Haggadah, Brooks expands into fiction to cover the gaps in the book's history. People of the Bookis a fascinating, and sometimes fantastic, mystery.
(EE)
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