People of the Book
People of the Book
A single illustrated manuscript survived the Inquisition, the Nazis, and the Siege of Sarajevo. Brooks followed the evidence and invented the rest with precision.
The Sarajevo Haggadah
Geraldine Brooks's 2008 novel is inspired by the real Sarajevo Haggadah, an illuminated Jewish manuscript from 15th-century Spain that survived the Inquisition, Austrian rule, Nazi occupation, and the 1990s Siege of Sarajevo. The novel follows Australian rare book conservator Hanna Heath, who is called to examine the manuscript after the Bosnian War, and traces each physical clue in the book backwards through five centuries of owners who saved it from destruction. Brooks moves between contemporary Sarajevo, Vienna under the Nazis, Sarajevo in 1894, Venice during the Inquisition, and Seville in 1480 to find the people who protected a book when the world wanted to burn it.
Reading People of the Book
Discovery
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Century
"Books are not objects to own. They are voices to hear across centuries.
"Geraldine Brooks
Brooks was inspired by visiting the real Sarajevo Haggadah, which survived World War II when a Muslim curator named Dervis Korkut hid it from the Nazis. She spent years researching the manuscript's actual history.
Brooks won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2006 for her novel March, a retelling of Little Women from the absent father's perspective. People of the Book followed two years later to similar acclaim.