Brook's Biblical Fiction a Winner

Lauren Winner has a great book review of Geraldine Brooks 'new novel, The People of the Book, in the current issue of Books & Culture Magazine.

An excerpt...

Geraldine Brooks—author of two terrific novels, Year of Wonders and the Pulitzer Prize-winning March—has outdone herself. Her newest offering, People of the Book: A Novel, opens in 1996 with the arrival Hanna Heath, a 30-year-old book conservator, to Sarajevo. Hanna is there to work on an illuminated manuscript known as the Sarajevo haggadah. (A haggadah contains the liturgy for the Passover seder.) The manuscript's history, Hanna explains, is mysterious: it had come to the attention of scholars in 1894, when a man named Kohen offered it for sale, and a century later, academics knew little more than that it was created in medieval Spain. In 1992, at the start of the Sarajevo siege, the book vanished. People speculated that it had been fenced or destroyed, but in fact a Muslim librarian named Ozren Karaman had, at great risk to himself, secreted the codex away for safekeeping. Now, with the shelling of Sarajevo over, Karaman has revealed the book's whereabouts, and the UN, keen to make sure its binding is in tip-top shape so that the book can be displayed in a morale-building museum exhibit, has hired Hanna.

Hanna finds several unusual objects hiding in the haggadah's binding, including a scrap of insect wing and a white hair. Hanna is curious, and excited: occasionally, she explains, even the smallest breadcrumb found in a book's pages can help scholars recreate the social history of an individual book—where it was used, and by whom.

With that, we're off.

I am waiting for my copy of this book. My background and love for biblical iconography is calling me to read this book. But I'm also am curious about this time period, not so much its history, bu I could learn from it. In Atlanta three mosques have been built in the past five years. My ex's family are half Catholic and half Muslim. I'm curious for my daughter's sake. How do we coexist in America in peace? What do I teach my daughter about the importance of her faith when I have no personal experience to rely on?

Photo of Atlanta Masjid Abdullah courtesy of Adilyana