by Geraldine Brooks
I checked this book out from the library because my curiosity was aroused by the Michigan State University Art Museum exhibit of Jewish haggadah (actually, I think the plural is haggadot) which I'm not going to get to go see because they were closed over the weekend when I had planned to go and the exhibit closes today. Anyway, it was a very good book. I got wrapped up in the story and liked the way it went from 1996 back to tell the history and then back again to Hanna's point of view.
Here's the publisher's synopsis:
Inspired by a true story, People of the Book is a novel of
sweeping historical grandeur and intimate emotional intensity by an
acclaimed and beloved author. Called "a tour de force" by the San Francisco Chronicle,
this ambitious, electrifying work traces the harrowing journey of the
famed Sarajevo Haggadah, a beautifully illuminated Hebrew manuscript
created in fifteenth-century Spain. When it falls to Hanna Heath, an
Australian rare-book expert, to conserve this priceless work, the
series of tiny artifacts she discovers in its ancient binding—an
insect wing fragment, wine stains, salt crystals, a white hair—only
begin to unlock its deep mysteries and unexpectedly plunges Hanna into
the intrigues of fine art forgers and ultra-nationalist fanatics.
