Audiobook
£0.00
with membership trial

Library binding
£21.78

Paperback
£8.99

FREE Returns

FREE delivery Friday, 26 January on your first order to UK or Ireland. Details

Or fastest delivery Tomorrow, 24 January. Order within 15 hrs 43 mins. Details

Select delivery location

In stock

££8.99 () Includes selected options. Includes initial monthly payment and selected options. Details

Dispatches from

Amazon

Dispatches from

Amazon

Sold by

Amazon

Sold by

Amazon

Returns

Returnable within 30 days of receipt

Returns

Returnable within 30 days of receipt

Item can be returned in its original condition for a full refund within 30 days of receipt

Read full Amazon return policy

Payment

Secure transaction

Payment

Secure transaction

We work hard to protect your security and privacy. Our payment security system encrypts your information during transmission. We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others. Learn more

Details

Add gift options

£1.80 delivery 27 - 31 January. Details

Select delivery location

Used: Very Good | Details

Sold by musicMagpie

Image Unavailable

Image not available for
Colour:

To view this video download Flash Player

Follow the author

Geraldine Brooks

Follow

People Of The Book Paperback – 1 Oct. 2008

by Geraldine Brooks (Author)

4.3 8,604 ratings

See all formats and editions

Save 5% on any 4 qualifying items | Terms

{"desktop_buybox_group_1":[{"displayPrice":"£8.99","priceAmount":8.99,"currencySymbol":"£","integerValue":"8","decimalSeparator":".","fractionalValue":"99","symbolPosition":"left","hasSpace":false,"showFractionalPartIfEmpty":true,"offerListingId":"8KlH72Wd103oMSxe1eGXbhwL0qoV6dtwp5%2BwUx60bnp%2BTndOLK8mP7fLSWDNnE4R%2BvqVJpPY3BH0QT5evtHn0i1fyPjNk%2BqLQsinbjcx8Hf%2FVtGnDQ0Rga8OB53j9wic","locale":"en-GB","buyingOptionType":"NEW","aapiBuyingOptionIndex":0}, {"displayPrice":"£1.49","priceAmount":1.49,"currencySymbol":"£","integerValue":"1","decimalSeparator":".","fractionalValue":"49","symbolPosition":"left","hasSpace":false,"showFractionalPartIfEmpty":true,"offerListingId":"8KlH72Wd103oMSxe1eGXbhwL0qoV6dtw%2BLQJ%2FYMuLuqmmIRhBW1Yqt2GxWGvv6oOVrvojT0JXfhNMIeIdmYCNOxQ92BvlJS8hwc9hwgCBoiJKVwx8ZoWV0rsEEyKNwMqpuGkNZFY%2BkrYt93H%2B5OfeAEoQInBfGJFYQPbGJrZ7%2BpDrGc3vgliEfoQLdcNAxsB","locale":"en-GB","buyingOptionType":"USED","aapiBuyingOptionIndex":1}]}

Purchase options and add-ons

The new novel from the author of ‘March’ and ‘Year of Wonders’ takes place in the aftermath of the Bosnian War, as a young book conservator arrives in Sarajevo to restore a lost treasure.

When Hannah Heath gets a call in the middle of the night in her Sydney home about a precious medieval manuscript which has been recovered from the smouldering ruins of wartorn Sarajevo, she knows she is on the brink of the experience of a lifetime. A renowned book conservator, she must now make her way to Bosnia to start work on restoring The Sarajevo Haggadah, a Jewish prayer book – to discover its secrets and piece together the story of its miraculous survival. But the trip will also set in motion a series of events that threaten to rock Hannah’s orderly life, including her encounter with Ozren Karamen, the young librarian who risked his life to save the book.

As meticulously researched as all of Brooks’s previous work, ‘People of the Book’ is a gripping and moving novel about war, art, love and survival.

ISBN-10

9780007177424
ISBN-13

978-0007177424
Edition

1st Harper Perennial Edition
Publisher

Penguin Books
Publication date

1 Oct. 2008
Language

English
Dimensions

12.9 x 2.5 x 19.8 cm
Print length

400 pages
See all details

Frequently bought together

£8.99

In stock

Sent from and sold by Amazon.

+

Year of Wonders: Geraldine Brooks (Collins Modern Classics)

£6.99

Get it as soon as Friday, Jan 26

Only 12 left in stock.

Sold by Essjays Enterprises Ltd and sent from Amazon Fulfillment.

+

£9.19

In stock

Sent from and sold by Amazon.

Total price:

To see our price, add these items to your basket.

Try again!

Details

Added to Basket

Some of these items are dispatched sooner than the others.

Show details Hide details

Choose items to buy together.

Geraldine Brooks
32,558
Paperback
25 offers from £9.18
Geraldine Brooks
9,635
Paperback
26 offers from £3.95
Geraldine Brooks
5,707
Paperback
43 offers from £0.01
Geraldine Brooks
4,182
Paperback
22 offers from £0.80
Geraldine Brooks
4,913
Mass Market Paperback
35 offers from £1.00
Rachel Kadish
12,992
Paperback
23 offers from £4.83

From the Publisher

bestselling classics books;bestselling fiction books;classics novels;top fiction books;fiction reads

Product description

Review

'Brooks expertly guides us to the conclusion that the world is made up of only two types of people: those who would destroy books and those who would give their lives to save them. This illuminating novel, like its predecessor, is well worthy of both Pulitzer and prime-time approbation.' Independent on Sunday

'These stories have a raw and visceral power. The book is full of historical detail.' Naomi Alderman, F.T. Magazine

'An irresistible subject, given urgency by its timeliness and poignancy by its paradoxicality: for the novel is based on the true story of an ancient Jewish codex saved from the fire by a Muslim librarian. Her performance will satisfy many readers.' Guardian

'The epic themes of love and war are her preferred canvas and here she sets up multiple narrative strands to tell the turbulent story of this Haggadah. Anti-Semitism is the momentum propelling the book's extraordinary journey forwards and Brooks evokes her various fraught historical-religious conflicts vividly.' Metro

‘Even more compelling than the detective plot is the novel's portrayal of the harrowing lives of its historical characters. Brooks is a compassionate writer. “People of the Book” is a powerful account of individual resistance to intolerance and the precious value of history. It is also a gripping story.' TLS

'The descriptions are sensuous and the story fascinating.' The Times'

“Lively historical novel…Brooks enlivens her page-turner with a clever, urbane narrator…the engrossing details of Heath's book-detecting skills make her a truly likable heroine.” Observer

Review

'These stories have a raw and visceral power. The book is full of historical detail.'

Review

'An irresistible subject, given urgency by its timeliness and poignancy by its paradoxicality: for the novel is based on the true story of an ancient Jewish codex saved from the fire by a Muslim librarian. Her performance will satisfy many readers.'

Review

'The epic themes of love and war are her preferred canvas and here she sets up multiple narrative strands to tell the turbulent story of this Haggadah. Anti-Semitism is the momentum propelling the book's extraordinary journey forwards and Brooks evokes her various fraught historical-religious conflicts vividly.'

Book Description

'Even more compelling than the detective plot is the novel's portrayal of the harrowing lives of its historical characters. Brooks is a compassionate writer. "People of the Book" is a powerful account of individual resistance to intolerance and the precious value of history. It is also a gripping story.'

From the Back Cover

The book came across six-hundred years and an entire continent. Through the hands of the devout, the desperate and the deadly. To the one woman who can bring it all to glorious life...

During World War II a Bosnian Muslim risks his life to face the book from the Nazis; it gets caught up in the intrigues of the hedonistic denizens of nineteenth-century Vienna; a Catholic priest saves it from burning in the fires of the Inquisition; these stories and more make up the secret history of the priceless Sarajevo Haggadah - a medieval Jewish prayer book recovered from the smouldering ruins of the war torn city.

Now it is in the skilled hands of the rare-book restorer Hanna Heath. And while the content of book interests her, it is the hidden history which captures her imagination. Because to her the tiny clues - salt crystals, a hair, wine stains - that she discovers in the pages and bindings, are keys to unlock its mysteries...

About the Author

Geraldine Brooks was born and raised in Australia. After moving to the USA she worked for eleven years on The Wall Street Journal, where she covered crises in the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. Her first novel, Year of Wonders, was an international bestseller and she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction for her second, March. She has written three further bestselling novels, Caleb’s Crossing, People of the Book and The Secret Chord.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ 0007177429
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Penguin Books; 1st Harper Perennial Edition (1 Oct. 2008)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 400 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 9780007177424
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0007177424
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 12.9 x 2.5 x 19.8 cm

Best Sellers Rank: 53,979 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- 138 in Spiritual & Historical Fiction
- 144 in Jewish Fiction
- 454 in Rural Life Humour

Customer reviews:
4.3 8,604 ratings

About the author

Follow authors to get new release updates, plus improved recommendations.

Geraldine Brooks

Brief content visible, double tap to read full content.

Full content visible, double tap to read brief content.

Geraldine Brooks is the author of the novels The Secret Chord, Caleb's Crossing, People of the Book, March (which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2006) and Year of Wonders, recently optioned by Olivia Coleman. She has also written three works of non-fiction: Nine Parts of Desire, based on her experiences among Muslim women in the mideast, Foreign Correspondence, a memoir about an Australian childhood enriched by penpals around the world and her adult quest to find them, and The Idea of Home:Boyer Lectures 2011. Brooks started out as a reporter in her hometown, Sydney, and went on to cover conflicts as a Wall Street Journal correspondent in Bosnia, Somalia, and the Middle East. She now lives on Martha's Vineyard in Massachusetts with two sons, a horse named Valentine and a dog named Bear.

Customer reviews

4.3 out of 5

8,604 global ratings

How customer reviews and ratings work

Sort reviews by

Top reviews from United Kingdom

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.

Linda Smith

Close to sublime

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 20 April 2009

Verified Purchase

The structure and plotting of this book are close to sublime and I am stunned by the magnitude of Brooks's accomplishment. It is incredibly difficult to recreate a period; to recreate six of them is an extraordinary feat. Her skills in research are matched by her power of imagination and she combines the two - fact and fiction - into one compelling story for our times. To have a historical novel set in a contemporary frame is common enough: what is rare is for it to work, and for the contemporary story to be just as rich and interesting as the rest.

I wonder how, as a humane and female author, she managed to write the more harrowing scenes. They are difficult enough to read - to dwell on them in the imagination must have exerted a psychic toll on her. Personally I found the plot twist at the end unnecessary, but as is obvious from the reviews here, one man's meat is another's poison. This book has something for everyone and, so far as I'm concerned, lifts contemporary fiction to a new height.

It does need quality time for reading, and is certainly not a holiday read, not unless you are thick-skinned enough to enjoy a hedonistic fortnight while reading about the sufferings of others.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 21 February 2010

Verified Purchase

The author, like the professional book-conservator Hanna, the central figure in this book, is an Australian, and I imagine she has endowed her character with some autobiographical characteristics, which include the occasional tangy Aussie way of speaking.

The Book of the title is a Haggadah (a book Jews use during the celebration of Passover at home). This particular one is the famous Sarajevo Haggdah, a book that really exists and is so called because, though this illuminated manuscript was produced in Spain in the 14th century, it has finished up in Sarajevo. There is much information about it, as well as reproductions of the pictures, on Google.

The book opens with Hanna's visit to Sarajevo in 1996, when the city was still under Serb bombardment, on a United Nations mission to stabilize the condition of the book. Geraldine Brooks, who was a newspaper correspondent there during the Bosnian war, can paint a convincing picture of Sarajevo at that time. She also loves books and has done meticulous research on the art of book conservation, and on what can be deduced about a book's history from microscopic examination, not only of the parchment and the colours, but also from tiny foreign bodies that have been trapped in the book. From that kind of detective work, she then proceeds to trying to trace the book's earlier history, moving backwards from the present.

The chapters now alternate between historical fiction and Hanna's own narrative. Hanna's includes some subplots, one of them about the difficult relationship between her and her mother, and that is alive and very well done. In the historical sections, however, the style is sometimes more wooden and sometimes a little clunky in the way they communicate well-researched historical information. But the stories Geraldine Brooks invents as the book passes from one era to another are ingenious; and the end has the unexpected twists of a detective thriller.

The first episode tells how the book is spirited out of a Bosnian museum to save it from the Germans during their occupation of Yugoslavia. The next how the museum had sent it for rebinding to a bookbinder in the antisemitic Vienna of the 1890s. The museum had originally bought it from a Bosnian Jew who had had it handed down in his family from his Italian Sephardi ancestors; so the next historical chapter takes us to the Venice of 1609 and its ghetto. Then further back in time to the Spain of 1492, the year of the expulsion of the Jews from Spain and of the sickening horrors that befell suspect conversos at the hands of the Inquisition. Then back another 12 years, to a time when Seville was still under Moorish rule, for the story of the book's creation. The survival of the Haggadah, through all those periods suffused with the cruelties of their time, is of course symbolic.

5 people found this helpful

Helpful

A special book about a special book

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 25 May 2017

Verified Purchase

Geraldine Brooks has given us a well-written, highly compelling, complex and enthralling story. Who would think a novel about a book - albeit a rare and special book - could be so exciting? But Geraldine Brooks takes the reader, page by page, leaf by leaf, into the world of rare books and their conservation, the background and possible history of such a book, and on a fascinating, multi-cultural, and labyrinthine journey through the tangles of history, from the Bosnian war in Sarajevo to the Jewish artisans of Andalusia at the time of the Spanish Inquisition, via Vienna in the 19th century and Venice in the 16th, each period highlighted with vivid and resonant characters and scene-setting. The time-travelling is interspersed with the present-day, as the talented but slightly dysfunctional conservationist, Australian Hanna, discovers the secrets of this tantalising book, a 15th-century Jewish Haggadah, and the secret behind her own life.

This novel is one of my all-time favourite books and every time I re-read it (on a 2 yearly basis); I always find new nuances of detail or delight in a particular character or setting. The author throws all her considerable knowledge, journalistic experience and technical expertise into this marvellous novel and I think it's her best. And it's all the better for the fact that there really was such a rare book and this could be its story.

One person found this helpful

Helpful

Amazon Music Stream millions of songs	AbeBooks Books, art & collectables	ACX Audiobook Publishing Made Easy	Amazon Web Services Scalable Cloud Computing Services

Audible Download Audiobooks	Goodreads Book reviews & recommendations	Amazon Home Services Experienced pros Happiness Guarantee	IMDb Movies, TV & Celebrities

Kindle Direct Publishing Indie Digital & Print Publishing Made Easy	Shopbop Designer Fashion Brands	Amazon Warehouse Deep Discounts Open-Box Products	Amazon Business Service for business customers

	Whole Foods Market We Believe in Real Food

Buy new: £8.99£8.99 FREE delivery: Friday, Jan 26 Dispatches from: Amazon Sold by: Amazon

Buy used £1.49

Follow the author

People Of The Book Paperback – 1 Oct. 2008

Purchase options and add-ons

Frequently bought together

Customers who viewed this item also viewed

From the Publisher

Product description

Review

Review

Review

Review

Book Description

From the Back Cover

About the Author

Product details

About the author

Geraldine Brooks

Customer reviews

Top reviews from United Kingdom

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.

Buy new:

£8.99

FREE delivery: Friday, Jan 26

Dispatches from: Amazon

Sold by: Amazon

Buy used

£1.49