Books

Some years begin slowly when it comes to fiction. Last year did. It wasn't until mid-January, when The Castle in the Forest, Norman Mailer's novel about Hitler's childhood, was published, that things started rolling, and even then they rolled slowly.

CRAIG LaROTONDA/Special Contributor

A few good novels stood out by midwinter, but it wasn't until spring and summer edged into fall that we saw a stream of wonderful fiction, from foreign writers Haruki Murakami and Per Petterson, from our own Junot Diaz, Philip Roth and Sherman Alexie.

Now here we are at the beginning of another new year, and if we see even only two or three novels this year as intelligent and as entertaining as People of the Book, the third novel by Pulitzer Prize winner Geraldine Brooks, 2008 is going to be a very good year indeed.

Australian-born Brooks, a former foreign correspondent, went to history for the source of her first novel, Year of Wonders, and to literature for March, the book that won her a Pulitzer. In People of the Book she has constructed a marvelously intertwined narrative, with one strand tied to the contemporary world and the other leading us back into European history, into wars and inquisitions and family tragedies, all of this making up a vividly narrated, powerfully emotional quest for the origins of an ancient illustrated Hebrew prayer book.

The quest turns out to mean much more for Hanna Heath, the Australian book-conservator narrator, than she ever could have imagined at the start.

The novel opens in Sarajevo in the mid-90s, when Heath, who has been summoned to restore the newly recovered prayer book known as the Sarajevo Haggadah (a prayer manual for the Passover holiday), begins her restoration of the book. First, she takes it apart and discovers clues about its origins: the impression of the wing of an Alpine butterfly, stains of wine mingled with blood, a splash of salt water.

Her own life seems to her at first much less vivid, with only her overbearing neurosurgeon mother and an unknown paternity making up her uneventful Australian past. The main portion of the narration takes us deeper and deeper into the history of the haggadah, with masterfully conducted scenes from turn-of-the century Austria on back down to 17-century Venice and ultimately to medieval Spain. As a result, the mystery of the book's provenance becomes clearer and clearer, with the origin of its illustrations, uncharacteristic of a Hebrew prayer book, at the center of Hanna's research and the reader's ultimate preoccupation.

Alternating with these historical chapters are those that focus on Hanna's work in the present, work that leads her from Sarajevo to Boston, London and Tel Aviv and to an eventual revelatory confrontation with her suddenly ailing mother.

I don't want to give away the surprises of the story, but they do run deep, from the speculations about the creation of the book that make up the marvelously crafted main chapters out of the past and the shifts and jolts in the present moment that shake Hanna's long-held picture of herself as a bright young Australian woman with a conventional past.

The title itself should suggest the many layers of meaning in this erudite but suspenseful novel. There are people who made the book, the people in the book and, finally, the people who take it up and read it and become one with it during the rewarding days and nights it will take to read it.

Writers, characters, readers: We are all people of the book, a tribe that makes up the heart of every culture in which it evolves. Here's the gifted Geraldine Brooks at the center of it, starting off the new year with a butterfly wing and a prayer book.

National Public Radio commentator Alan Cheuse's latest book is The Fires: Two Novellas.

Geraldine Brooks (Viking, $25.95) Plan Your Life

Geraldine Brooks will speak as part of Arts & Letters Live Jan. 16 at Temple Emanu-El of Dallas, 8500 Hillcrest Road. $22-$37. Call 214-922-1818.

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