FULL SUMMARY
People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks

Full Book Summary

People of the Book: An Overview

At a Glance

  • Genre: Historical fiction; literary mystery
  • Setting: From 14th‑century Spain to 17th‑century Venice, fin‑de‑siècle Vienna, WWII Yugoslavia, and 1990s Sarajevo, with modern scenes in Australia and Israel
  • Perspective: Primarily first‑person in the contemporary storyline (Hanna), interwoven with third‑person historical vignettes

Opening Hook

Across six centuries, a slim, illuminated Hebrew manuscript survives fires, inquisitions, deportations, and siege. In Geraldine Brooks’s novel, the Sarajevo Haggadah moves from hand to hand while history tries, repeatedly, to erase it. A modern conservator reads the book’s tiny scars like a crime scene, and each clue opens a door to the life that left it behind. What begins as a restoration becomes a chase, a confession, and a love letter to those who risk everything to keep culture alive.

Plot Overview

For the full sweep of events, see the Full Book Summary.

Act I: In 1996, Dr. Hanna Heath, a brilliant Australian conservator, is summoned to postwar Sarajevo to stabilize the famed Haggadah, newly resurfaced after the siege. In the museum’s dim lab, she meets Ozren Karaman, the Muslim librarian who spirited the manuscript out under shellfire. As she unbinds the codex—page by page, thread by thread—Hanna catalogs evidence as intimate as fingerprints: a wing, a hair, salt crystals, old stains. These traces propel the story backward, each artifact unlocking the life that touched the book first, as previewed in the opening chapters (Chapter 1-2 Summary).

Act II: The clues speak. An insect’s wing lifts the curtain on Sarajevo in 1940, where Lola, a Jewish teenager turned Partisan, survives because the Haggadah is hidden by the museum’s chief librarian, Serif Kamal, in a mountain mosque—an act of quiet defiance amid rising fascism. The loss of the original silver clasps traces to Vienna in 1894 and a sick, compromised binder whose petty theft stains the book with his shame. Wine and blood on the vellum carry us to Venice, 1609, where Giovanni Domenico Vistorini, an Inquisition censor, spares the Haggadah—perhaps because the pages mirror a buried piece of his own identity. Salt crystals glitter from 1492 Tarragona, where Ruti Ben Shoushan flees the expulsion of the Jews and risks a clandestine ritual at sea to reclaim a child from enforced conversion. Finally, a single white hair with pigment points to Seville, 1480, and to Zahra bint Ibrahim al-Tarek, an enslaved Muslim artist whose hidden illuminations make the book not only sacred text but work of radical beauty.

Act III: The present tightens around Hanna. Her chemistry with Ozren is shadowed by his grief for his wife and his catastrophically injured son. The Haggadah’s fragments echo her own unanswered past, driving her back into the cold orbit of her formidable surgeon mother and the mystery of a father she has never met. Professional mastery can’t buffer the personal cost: the more Hanna sees into the book’s life, the more she has to look into her own.

Act IV: Six years later, the “miracle” on display is a counterfeit. Hanna discovers that her old mentor, Werner Heinrich, and a devastated Ozren conspired to swap the original for a perfect forgery and hide the true Haggadah at Yad Vashem, thinking Israel safer than Sarajevo. To right the theft, Hanna undertakes a covert return, smuggling the real manuscript back to the city that claimed it at such cost. In a final reveal from deep within the pages, she uncovers a secret about the book’s creation—an intimate maker’s mark that redefines authorship and the manuscript’s crossing of faiths.

Central Characters

A full Character Overview expands on the cast.

  • Dr. Hanna Heath: A meticulous conservator whose tools are scalpels, light, and patience. Her precision at work contrasts with an armored private life shaped by an aloof mother and an absent father. Hanna’s hunt for provenance becomes a search for kinship and truth, binding her fate to the Haggadah’s.

  • Ozren Karaman: The Sarajevo librarian who hides courage behind understatement. His rescue of the Haggadah is an act of conviction, but grief narrows his vision and pushes him into a morally gray choice that upends Hanna’s faith in institutions—and in him.

  • Lola; Serif Kamal; Giovanni Domenico Vistorini; Ruti Ben Shoushan; Zahra bint Ibrahim al-Tarek: The historical guardians, artists, and outcasts who embody the book’s journey. Each figure, often marginalized by gender, class, or creed, reveals how culture survives through fragile, human hands.

Major Themes

For a broader map of ideas, see the Theme Overview.

  • The Power and Endurance of Stories and Artifacts: The Haggadah functions as the novel’s central character—its stains, repairs, and marginalia holding testimony that people and regimes tried to erase. Brooks shows how objects outlast violence, bearing memory forward when human witnesses are silenced.

  • Religious and Cultural Coexistence and Conflict: Moments of convivencia flash and fade as tolerance gives way to zealotry—from Inquisition Spain to the Holocaust to the Bosnian War. By tracing rescue across faith lines, the novel argues that culture at its best is collaborative, and at its worst, a casualty of sectarian power.

  • The Nature of History and Memory: Hanna’s forensic methods recover data; the vignettes supply lived texture. Together they suggest that history is stitched from proof and story, and that gaps—what’s burned, lost, or censored—are as telling as what remains.

  • Identity and Belonging: Characters navigate imposed labels and hidden selves, whether converso, censor, artist, or refugee. Hanna’s search for her father mirrors the manuscript’s search for a home, pairing personal lineage with cultural inheritance.

  • Courage and Moral Choice: Ordinary people—librarians, binders, partisans—make decisions under pressure that either preserve or imperil the fragile thread of civilization. The novel honors quiet bravery over spectacle.

  • The Relationship Between Past and Present: The structure collapses time; modern science resurrects medieval brushstrokes. Brooks insists that we live among the aftershocks of earlier choices, and that stewardship today determines what survives tomorrow.

  • Love, Loss, and Family: Fractured bonds—Hanna and her mother, Ozren and his son, families torn by edict and war—give the plot its pulse. The Haggadah becomes a surrogate family history, binding strangers across centuries.

Literary Significance

Brooks humanizes grand history by telling it through the handling of a single, fragile object. The Haggadah ties together a tradition of novels centered on art-as-protagonist, yet this book’s originality lies in how conservation becomes detection and, finally, moral reckoning. It celebrates unsung custodians—archivists, librarians, artists—who risk anonymity and safety so that culture endures. “A book is more than the sum of its materials. It is an artifact of the human mind and hand.” That credo, echoed throughout the novel and captured in its most memorable lines, is explored further in selected Quotes.

Historical Context

Rooted in the real Sarajevo Haggadah—a 14th‑century Spanish manuscript that twice survived 20th‑century cataclysms—the novel anchors fiction to fact. Brooks builds on known rescues by Muslim librarians during WWII and the 1990s siege, then imagines the manuscript’s earlier odyssey through:

  • Al‑Andalus: a period of cultural exchange that nurtures the book’s creation.
  • The Spanish Inquisition: expulsion and forced conversion splinter Jewish families.
  • 17th‑century Venice: a hub of print under the shadow of censorship.
  • Fin‑de‑siècle Vienna: artistic ferment alongside modern anti‑Semitism.
  • WWII Yugoslavia: occupation, collaboration, and Partisan resistance.
  • The Bosnian War: the siege that frames the contemporary narrative.

Critical Reception

Critics praised Brooks’s research, elegant prose, and mosaic structure, noting how the vignettes vividly inhabit their eras while advancing a gripping mystery. Some found the contemporary plot—especially Hanna’s romance—cooler than the historical chapters, yet the novel’s cumulative force won over readers and book clubs alike. People of the Book endures as a tribute to cultural stewardship and the stubborn life of art.