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   Summary and Book Reviews

People of the Book: Summary and book reviews of People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks, plus links to an excerpt from People of the Book and a biography of Geraldine Brooks.

People of the Book People of the Book
by Geraldine Brooks
Hardcover: Jan 2008,
384 pages.
Paperback: Jan 2009,
672 pages.

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Book Summary

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.

Book Reviews

BookBrowse - Lisa A. Goldstein
The title encapsulates it all: it's about the people of the book, because if not for them, the Haggadah would not have survived. Brooks' larger message, one that's particularly apt today, could ultimately be about how diverse cultures influence and enrich one another.
Full Review Members Only (members only, 966 words).


 Library Journal - Barbara Hoffert
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 (March) is a good addition to most libraries and excellent for discussion groups.

 Kirkus Reviews
Rich suspense based on a true-life literary puzzle, from the Pulitzer Prize-winning Brooks.

 Publishers Weekly - Margot Livesey
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.

 The Christian Science Monitor - Yvonne Zipp
The occasional heavy-handedness, as well as the fact that every single story is loaded with portent about the treatment of the Jewish people (and women) over the centuries, makes it impossible to shake off the knowledge that Brooks is always hovering over the pages, a benevolent professor conducting a history lesson in the importance of tolerance.

 New York Times - Janet Maslin
"For the librarians," says the dedication page of Geraldine Brooks's new novel. That's an understatement. What librarian could resist a novel that has the word book in its title, is centered on an intrepid book conservator, exults in book-preservation exotica and has a plot about a rare book with a long, fraught and serpentine history? But the intense bibliographic appeal of People of the Book turns out to be a mixed blessing. It lands Ms. Brooks neck-deep in research. It overburdens her tale in ways that make it more admirable than gripping.

 Entertainment Weekly - Jennifer Reese
The peripatetic tome embodies the long interrelationship — sometimes fruitful, often fraught — between Muslims, Christians, and Jews. But too often, you sense Brooks behind the scenes, pulling strings. B

 Chicago Sun-Times Cheryl L Reed
Brooks is not a stylist. Her writing is descriptive without the pileup of clever adjectives. Having learned to write economically while a Wall Street Journal reporter, Brooks dispenses with events in her novel that in another author's hand would take pages. Her use of the dual narrative probably seemed like a nifty way of enlivening dusty details, but its construct detracts from the otherwise fascinating account of a booker whodunit.

 Los Angeles Times - Emily Barton
A.S. Byatt published her literary mystery Possession almost 18 years ago, and it's been a long dry season for the genre since -- perhaps because books about books don't naturally present many occasions for derring-do. Geraldine Brooks has, however, half-found and half-invented a swashbuckling book and, despite occasional quirks, woven a tale that's haunting and satisfying.


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