Opening
In 1996 Sarajevo, a rare medieval manuscript reemerges from war’s wreckage, drawing Hanna Heath, an Australian conservator, into a forensic hunt through history. Her meticulous work in the present threads into a wartime tale of survival in 1940s Bosnia, where a hidden act of bravery plants the first physical clue to the book’s journey.
What Happens
Chapter 1: Hanna
Five months after the Bosnian War, Hanna arrives in a ravaged Sarajevo to stabilize the legendary Sarajevo Haggadah—an illuminated 15th-century Hebrew manuscript believed lost in the siege. In a barricaded bank boardroom, she unpacks scalpels, swabs, and lenses with ritual care, narrating the precision of a craft her neurosurgeon mother dismisses as “kindergarten work.” Chosen by mentor Amitai Yomtov for her skill and politically neutral passport, she tries to quiet her fear and focus on the page: intact pigments, scarred vellum, history etched in stains.
The librarian who brings the book looks like a hungover grad student—until Hanna realizes he is Dr. Ozren Karaman, the man who pulled the Haggadah from the shelled museum. As she explains her ethic—stabilize, do not erase; preserve damage as evidence of life—she frames the novel’s belief in The Power and Endurance of Stories and Artifacts. Dismantling the binding, she tweezes out her first clues: a dust-fine insect wing and a single white hair. Ozren takes her to dinner in the Old City. Their chemistry flares; they sleep together. Over shared meals and smoke-stained streets, he recounts rescuing the Haggadah under shellfire—an act of Courage and Moral Choice.
The intimacy fractures when Hanna discovers a portrait of Ozren’s wife, Aida, killed by a sniper, and learns that their infant son, Alia, is in a coma. Hanna reaches instinctively for solutions—leveraging her mother’s expertise to seek a second opinion. Ozren explodes, accusing her of coming from a “safe world” that refuses to accept irreparable loss. They break. Shaken but stubborn, Hanna forges a request to obtain Alia’s scans anyway. At week’s end, she leaves for Vienna carrying the book’s micro-evidence and the boy’s records. There, an entomologist identifies the wing as Parnassius mnemosyne leonhardiana, a rare alpine butterfly—Hanna’s first hard lead.
Chapter 2: An Insect’s Wing
The narrative flashes back to Sarajevo in 1940, keyed to the discovered wing. Lola, a 15-year-old Sephardic girl, sneaks to Zionist youth gatherings for the dancing and a crush rather than ideology. The city’s easy mingling of cultures—Jewish, Muslim, Christian—prefigures the rupture of Religious and Cultural Coexistence and Conflict. In April 1941, the Nazis invade. Lola’s father is deported and killed; her mother and little sister are rounded up and held in a synagogue. Lola slips inside, but her mother forces her to flee alone.
Lola escapes into the mountains with Ina and Ina’s brother, Isak, joining Partisan fighters. A laundress turned muleteer and apprentice medic, she endures cold camps, hunger, and chaos. Then the unit is abruptly disbanded, abandoning the mostly Jewish youths, unarmed. When Ina grows gravely ill, Isak carries her onto a frozen river; the ice breaks. Both drown before Lola’s eyes.
Half-starved, she makes it back to Sarajevo and is taken in by a colleague of her late father, who brings her to Serif Kamal, chief librarian of the National Museum, and his wife, Stela. Devout Muslims, they hide Lola as an Albanian maid even as the Nazis demand the Haggadah. Serif and his director outmaneuver a visiting general, smuggling the book out of the museum. Serif then drives to a mountain village and entrusts the manuscript to the local khoja, who conceals it in the mosque library. As the khoja and his son examine the pages, a specimen from the boy’s butterfly box flutters down and nestles deep in the binding—an unnoticed deposit that will surface half a century later on Hanna’s table.
Character Development
The chapters build a quartet of moral portraits shaped by war, craft, and loss.
- Hanna Heath: Brilliant, exacting, and emotionally guarded. She prizes evidence and control, yet her affair and her covert effort to obtain Alia’s scans reveal a volatile mix of empathy, hubris, and rule-bending resolve.
- Ozren Karaman: Tender and broken, brave and uncompromising. He saves a book under fire but refuses consolations that deny the permanence of his family’s wound.
- Lola: From carefree teen to hardened survivor. She learns triage, loss, and endurance in the mountains, then risks trust again with strangers who shelter her.
- Serif Kamal: Quiet, principled, and strategic. A Muslim scholar who saves a Jewish girl and a Jewish manuscript, he models interfaith courage under occupation.
Themes & Symbols
The Haggadah embodies endurance: a fragile object that outlives regimes because people choose to protect it. Hanna’s conservation credo—stabilize the artifact, honor its scars—mirrors how the narrative treats history itself. Damage is data. Stains are testimony. Through that lens, forensic fragments become doorways into human lives.
Coexistence and conflict bookend the story world. Sarajevo’s pluralism collapses under fascism in the 1940s and under nationalism in the 1990s, yet individuals—Serif and Ozren—bridge divides through decisive risk. Their choices illuminate courage not as bravado but as ethically costly action. The personal toll of love and loss cuts across both timelines: Hanna’s cold maternal legacy, Ozren’s grief, and Lola’s orphanhood trace how war remakes families.
The butterfly wing is the novel’s hinge. Delicate and accidental, it binds timelines and transforms conservation into detection. It also reframes chance as causation: tiny traces carry history forward, waiting for a reader to notice.
Key Quotes
“world-class coward”
- Hanna labels herself with gallows humor even as she enters a mined city to save a book. The line exposes her anxiety while underscoring a deeper truth: courage often looks like moving forward while afraid.
“kindergarten work”
- Her mother’s contempt reduces Hanna’s painstaking craft to play, sharpening the novel’s tension between healing bodies and preserving culture. The jab clarifies Hanna’s need to prove the seriousness of her vocation—and why artifacts matter.
“safe world”
- Ozren’s accusation marks the rift. It names the moral distance between observers and sufferers of war, challenging Hanna’s impulse to fix what may be unfixable and highlighting boundaries sympathy can’t cross.
“some tragedies have no solution”
- This hard verdict refuses narrative consolation. It anchors the book’s ethical realism: not every wound heals, but the choice to safeguard meaning—the Haggadah, Lola’s survival—still matters.
Why This Matters and Section Significance
These chapters establish the novel’s engine: a present-tense investigation that unlocks past lives through physical evidence. Chapter 1 frames a contemporary quest; Chapter 2 provides the first historical key. The butterfly wing stitches the timelines, demonstrating The Relationship Between Past and Present: history persists in the material world, awaiting interpretation. By pairing acts of rescue across eras and placing grief beside craft, the section shows how courage, loss, and memory circulate through objects—and how reading them becomes an act of witness.