People of the Book is, for me as a reader, the perfect union of an author I love with subject matter I love. The author is, of course, Geraldine Brooks, famous for her Pulitzer-Prize-winning novel March, but even more admired (by me) for the haunting Year of Wonders, about a woman who survives the bubonic plague while a village dies around her. Her subject matter this time around is the sub-genre I like to call “Adventures in Research” — a genre made most popular in the unjustly famous Da Vinci Code, though far better exemplified, for my money, in Wilton Barnhardt’s underrated Gospel and a score of other books about dedicated researchers chasing elusive old manuscripts around the world.
People of the Book centres not around a fictional manuscript but a real one — the Sarajevo Haggadah, a beautifully and unusually illuminated medieval Jewish manuscript that has survived all kinds of historical threats to make it to the twenty-first century intact. Brooks takes the known facts of the manuscript’s survival in twentieth-century Bosnia — where this Jewish manuscript was twice saved by Muslim museum curators, once during World War Two and once during the 1990s civil war — and fictionalizes them. But the novelist’s imagination allows her to go farther than historical fact or even scholarly speculation — based on a handful of clues that Brooks’ narrator, fictional manuscript conservator Hanna Heath, finds in the Haggadah, she reconstructs the story of its long journey from fifteenth-century Seville to twenty-first century Sarajevo, creating stories and characters for each stage of the manuscript’s journey.