Geraldine Brooks (Harper Perennial)
Australian-born writer Geraldine Brooks’ latest novel People Of The Book is a piece of historical fiction with a twist of something special.
This time, instead of setting her entire story in one historical milieu — as she did with earlier effort Year Of Wonder and the Pulitzer Prize-winning March — Brooks jumps back and forth in time to explore the imagined story of the real, prized 14th century Sarajevo Haggadah, a Jewish prayer book that became a symbol of resistance after surviving many close calls with destruction.
In People Of The Book we meet proud Sydneysider Hannah Heath, a young book conservator who is called in to work on the manuscript, and in doing so pieces together the story of its miraculous survival.
But her trip to war-ravaged Sarajevo in 1996 is the catalyst for other events that lead this young woman to make discoveries about her own past.
Brooks, who now lives in the US, was a foreign correspondent specialising in trouble spots, before she traded it all in to write fiction.
It’s no surprise, then, that she favours tight prose that’s strong on narrative and drama. SAMANTHA BADEN
Geraldine Brooks (Harper Perennial)
Australian-born writer Geraldine Brooks’ latest novel People Of The Book is a piece of historical fiction with a twist of something special.
This time, instead of setting her entire story in one historical milieu — as she did with earlier effort Year Of Wonder and the Pulitzer Prize-winning March — Brooks jumps back and forth in time to explore the imagined story of the real, prized 14th century Sarajevo Haggadah, a Jewish prayer book that became a symbol of resistance after surviving many close calls with destruction.
In People Of The Book we meet proud Sydneysider Hannah Heath, a young book conservator who is called in to work on the manuscript, and in doing so pieces together the story of its miraculous survival.
But her trip to war-ravaged Sarajevo in 1996 is the catalyst for other events that lead this young woman to make discoveries about her own past.
Brooks, who now lives in the US, was a foreign correspondent specialising in trouble spots, before she traded it all in to write fiction.
It’s no surprise, then, that she favours tight prose that’s strong on narrative and drama. SAMANTHA BADEN
