People of the Book

People of the Book follows Hanna Heath, a rare-book conservator examining the Sarajevo Haggadah after the Bosnian War. Small traces in the manuscript lead the novel into linked historical episodes across Jewish, Muslim and Christian worlds, including medieval Iberia, Venice, Vienna, wartime Sarajevo and the modern Balkans. The book is structured around the survival of a manuscript and the people who protect, use, endanger or interpret it across centuries of exile, persecution and cultural exchange.