"People of the Book" by Geraldine Brooks

An audio book. An important Hebrew book, The Hagada, 5 centuries old, is lost for 4 years in Sarajevo during the war. When it re-emerges, the UN gets an Australian book expert in - Australia being politically neutral. Hannah, in her 30s, is on principle a conserver, not a mender. On her first day, having had an armoured escort from the plane, she meets Caraman, the Muslim academic who bravely saved the book. He's in his 30s too. On her first night they sleep together. She likes sex with men, doesn't like emotional involvement. His wife was shot died the year before. His little son was shot too, and hasn't woken.

She finds stains, a hair, and remains of an insect in the book. Clasps are missing.

We return to Sarajevo, WW2. A Jewish girl escapes to the countrywise, then has to escape again, back towards Sarajevo. I didn't find that section interesting. A Muslim family shelter her. By chance, the family shelter the book for a night or 2, protecting it bravely from the Nazis. We learn how the foreign matter got into the book.

Hannah doesn't know who her father is. Her mother's a famous surgeon. Hannah goes to Vienna to research the book (it was last bound there), and onto the States to see if Caraman's son is treatable. He isn't.

Dr Hirschfield, a Jew, works in Vienna c.1900, city of suicides and sexual diseases. The author's historical research shows through. One of his patients is Herr Mittel, a non-jewish book-binder, a syphylis sufferer. The doctor suggests to him an expensive cure. Mittel steals the clasps of a book to pay for the treatment.

In 1400s Venice, a Rabbi exploits Carnevale's masks to gamble, etc. Books are censored. Jews are ghettoed. A female Jew who fakes being a Christian gives charity money to the Rabbi and says she's going to convert back. The Rabbi redacts the woman's Hagada hoping thereby that it will avoid being burned. We discover how the book gained blood-stains. Another slow section.

Hannah's mother is in a serious car accident. Hannah learns that Delilah (the driver who died when the car crashed - no other vehicle involved) was her grandmother. Her father (an artist) was a patient her colleague had operated on and who'd died post-op. Hannah meets the res she never knew.

Barcelona, 1492. The inquisition is a money-earner. A jew buys an illuminated page from a refugee (which provides an explanation for the sea-salt found on the book). His son had converted to christianity for love. He's tortured for not being a genuine convert. His father tries to raise a ransom.

Seville, 1480s - a muslim slave (a doctor's daughter who had pretended to be a boy until he was about to become a eunuch) works as an artist in a harem. She made likenesses of the Emir's wife (allowed, because he missed her when away on invasions). The Emira's a secret christian. The artist and Emira sleep together. When the Emira becomes pregnant she escapes to a convent. The artist is saved by the court doctor, a Jew.

Hannah returns to Sarajevo, thinks that the Hagada's been replaced by a fake but she's not backed up by colleagues. 6 years later in Australia a diplomat shows her the real Hagada. It's her job to smuggle it back into Sarajevo. She meets Caraman (who'd been involved with the deception) and they perform the swap. Should they burn the fake?

Through the centuries, Jews and Muslims are friends, doctors and artists are friends.

Other reviews

• Helen Walasek (Brooks's novel March wonderfully transmuted historical record into fiction, but here she fails to convince. The stories of Jews and Muslims, far more connected than divided by history and culture (the few Christians are nasty pieces of work), leave us with a sense of being steamrollered by the author's obvious message. Most grating are Hanna's self-righteousness and her caricaturishly Philistine mother-from-hell. Meanwhile, a clunky thrillerish sub-plot lumbers to an implausible dénouement. Fiction or not, should Brooks be contentiously rewriting the history of a real artefact so central to a struggling nation's identity?)
• Ursula K Le Guin (The Hanna chapters, written in the first person, are full of dialogue and written in a sprightly, crisp, journalistic style, thoroughly readable and serviceable, if without distinction or aesthetic quality as prose. Unfortunately this self-confident sureness of touch vanishes with the first step back in time, to Yugoslavia in 1940, where the protagonist is a Jewish girl who joins the Partisans. The style gets clunkier. The grinding of axes can be heard. By the time we are in Barcelona in 1492, dialogue has descended to the level of Bulwer Lytton - "I know not what it is you imagine that I have done!" - and narration has become that heavy mixture of useful information with predictable behaviour and generalised description which weighs down so many historical novels like stones in the pocket of a coat. Full of action but with no leavening of humour, no psychological revelations, no vivid language to focus description, the chapters grind on. Most unhappily for a historical novel, there is little sensitivity to the local colour of thought and emotion, that openness to human difference which brings the past alive.)
• Nidzara Ahmetasevic (It is amazing how much effort Brooks has put into reconstructing the history of the book, describing its life in different countries at different times and putting it all in connection with the book. Her style of writting is lively and exciting, even if, at times, it is choked with too many details. On the other hand, it is disappointing to find that while the author made a huge effort to reconstruct the long history of a single book, she made little effort to take a wider look at the city she is writing about. What she describes about it is often inaccurate. It is especially disapointing also to read factual mistakes about the war in a book written by a former reporter on the Wall Street Journal.)
• Goodreads