Looking for a good book to read, to distract you from too much family over your vacation? I have just the thing! Geraldine Brooks is a great writer of what I like to call highly-educational fiction. She must spend years researching her subject before writing these books, because the historical detail is AMAZING! Lots of Jeopardy-worthy fun facts!
I loved her book Year of Wonders from 2002, where she chronicles one year in the life of a remote British village when the plague came to visit. How does it spread? How are lives impacted? A lovely read!
Now she tells the history behind an ancient, beautifully illuminated Jewish prayer book. Here’s a synopsis:
“One of the earliest Jewish religious volumes to be illuminated with images, the Sarajevo Haggadah survived centuries of purges and wars thanks to people of all faiths who risked their lives to safeguard it. Geraldine Brooks, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of March, has turned the intriguing but sparely detailed history of this precious volume into an emotionally rich, thrilling fictionalization that retraces its turbulent journey. In the hands of Hanna Heath, an impassioned rare-book expert restoring the manuscript in 1996 Sarajevo, it yields clues to its guardians and whereabouts: an insect wing, a wine stain, salt crystals, and a white hair. While readers experience crucial moments in the book’s history through a series of fascinating, fleshed-out short stories, Hanna pursues its secrets scientifically, and finds that some interests will still risk everything in the name of protecting this treasure. A complex love story, thrilling mystery, vivid history lesson, and celebration of the enduring power of ideas, People of the Book will surely be hailed as one of the best of 2008.” –Mari Malcolm
For librarians, writers, rare book experts and other “people of the book,” this is a masterpiece on the history of writing and the power of books. It showed me that writing is so much larger than the author or illustrator. This story made me think long and hard about how little we know about the impact our writing may have decades hence.
