The “complex and moving”(The New Yorker) novel by Pulitzer Prize–winner Geraldine Brooks follows a rare manuscript through centuries of exile and war

Inspired by a true story, People of the Book is a novel of sweeping historical grandeur and intimate emotional intensity by an acclaimed and beloved author. Called “a tour de force”by the San Francisco Chronicle, this ambitious, electrifying work traces the harrowing journey of the famed Sarajevo Haggadah, a beautifully illuminated Hebrew manuscript created in fifteenth-century S pain. When it falls to Hanna Heath, an Australian rare-book expert, to conserve this priceless work, the series of tiny artifacts she discovers in its ancient binding—an insect wing fragment, wine stains, salt crystals, a white hair—only begin to unlock its deep mysteries and unexpectedly plunges Hanna into the intrigues of fine art forgers and ultra-nationalist fanatics....

In this captivating book, award-winning journalist Geraldine Brooks offers an intimate, often shocking portrait of the lives of modern Muslim women, and shows how male pride and power have warped the original message of a once-liberating faith. "A valid, entertaining account of women in the Muslim world."--The New York Times Book Review....

As a young girl in a working-class neighborhood of Sydney, Australia, Geraldine Brooks longed to discover the places where history happens and culture comes from, so she enlisted pen pals who offered her a window on adolescence in the Middle East, Europe, and America. Twenty years later Brooks, an award-winning foreign correspondent, embarked on a human treasure hunt to find her pen friends. She found men and women whose lives had been shaped by war and hatred, by fame and notoriety, and by the ravages of mental illness. Intimate, moving, and often humorous, Foreign Correspondence speaks to the unquiet heart of every girl who has ever yearned to become a woman of the world....

Year of Wonders is historical fiction of the highest order--absolutely convincing in its period detail, filled with full-blooded characters who arouse one's deepest empathy, and driven by a story of striking immediacy. In 1665, the north of England remains untouched by the plague that is ravaging London. Then, in a small, close-knit community of lead miners and hill farmers, a bolt of cloth has no way of knowing that the damp fabric carries within its folds the deadly bubonic infection. Confronted with a scourge beyond remedy or understanding, the villagers turn in desperation to sorcery, herb lore, and murderous witch hunting--to no effect. Finally, led by a young and charismatic preacher, they elect to isolate themselves in a quarantine that may only deepen the tragedy. Told through the eyes of hard-working, inquisitive Anna Firth, who at age 18 must contend with the loss of her family and the disintegration of her community, Year of Wonders explores love and learning, fear and fanaticism, and the struggle of science and religion to interpret the world on the cusp of the modern era....