People of the Book - Geraldine Brooks Audiobook

Written by Geraldine Brooks
Read by Edwina Wren
Format: MP3
Bitrate: 64 Kbps

Publisher: Blackstone Audio
Release date: January 1, 2008
Duration: 13:55:42

This is the journey of a rare illuminated manuscript through centuries of exile and war.
In 1996, Hanna Heath, an Australian rare-book expert, is offered the job of a lifetime: analysis and conservation of the famed Sarajevo Haggadah, which has been rescued from Serb shelling during the Bosnian war. Priceless and beautiful, the book is one of the earliest Jewish volumes ever to be illuminated with images. When Hanna, a caustic loner with a passion for her work, discovers a series of tiny artifacts in its ancient binding—an insect-wing fragment, wine stains, salt crystals, a white hair—she begins to unlock the book’s mysteries.

The listener is ushered into an exquisitely detailed and atmospheric past, tracing the book’s journey from its salvation back to its creation.

Inspired by a true story, People of the Book is a novel of both sweeping historical grandeur and intimate emotional intensity and is an ambitious, electrifying work by an acclaimed and beloved author.

Narrator Edwina Wren is an Australian, as are this book’s author and its heroine, Hannah Heath. So that’s a match. Hannah is flown to war-torn Sarajevo to restore an ancient, priceless Haggadah. The sacred manuscript has been sent like a cork down the bloody torrent of history. The story’s characters and accents vary widely, and Wren rises magnificently to the challenge. The German officers don’t just want the manuscript, they “vont” it. “Let me see your chewish manuscripts . . .” Wren’s agile liquid voice is dipped in sugar. This too is a match, since the survival of the text is proof of the heroic ecumenism of book lovers. The opening inscription is from Henrich Heine: “There, where one burns books, one in the end burns men.” B.H.C. (c) AudioFile 2008, Portland, Maine