People of the Book
By Geraldine Brooks
HarperCollins, rrp $32.95

A 500-year-old Jewish prayer book. An Aussie who specialises in restoring ancient manuscripts. An angst-ridden librarian in Sarajevo.

They don’t exactly sound like the ingredients of a rip-roaring read, but they do hold the promise of intrigue – especially when Geraldine Brooks is wielding the pen.

The tale starts with Sydney book conservator Hanna receiving a late-night call summonsing her to Bosnia to inspect an illustrated Jewish prayer book – the 14-century Sarajevo Haggadah – which has been rescued during the height of the Bosnian War by a young Muslim librarian named Ozren.

Hanna is as excited as some of us might be if we received a free business-class round-the-world ticket.

For her, such ancient texts are full of exciting secrets and mysteries just waiting to be unravelled … and the Haggadah is no different.

Minuscule clues – a wine stain here, a cat’s whisker there – are the cue for a journey back in time through conflict-ridden Europe.

Brooks uses her imagination and historic reality to speculate how the Haggadah may have survived events such as the Inquisition and World War II, when such texts were routinely rooted out and destroyed.

But where there is persecution and despair, there is also courage and hope, with stories of individual Christians, Muslims and Jews risking their lives to protect each other and the sacred text.

Weaved in amid this historical thread is the story of Hanna’s own life – her estrangement from her cold neurosurgeon mother, the mystery of her extended family, and her romantic feelings for young Ozren.

Brooks, a former correspondent for the Wall Street Journal in Bosnia, Somalia, and the Middle East, has a true talent for melding fact with fiction to create a riveting read.

The idea that people might go to such lengths to protect a book – any book – gave me goosebumps.

And while most of the story is fiction, there is in fact a Sarajevo Haggadah which is believed to have been smuggled out of Spain by Spanish Jews expelled during the inquisition of 1492 - the picture above is from its pages.

It was also saved from the Nazis by a librarian during World War II and then hidden in a Muslim home, and it did, in fact, survive the Bosnian War of the 1990s.

For an intelligent and entertaining read, People of the Book is hard to beat.

— SUZANNE KEEN

Have you read People of the Book or any of Brooks’ other novels? What did you think?