Could I resist a book about the travels of a beautiful illuminated book? No, I couldn’t.

People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks It’s 1996. Hanna Heath is a young Australian book conservator, asked to work on the famous Sarajevo Haggadah. This book, which really exists, tells the story of Passover, and is a very rare example of a Jewish illuminated book. As Hannah takes apart the book to remove its horrid nineteenth century binding and examines all its pages, she finds various artifacts in it – a white hair, a butterfly wing, a red stain, and salt. Hanna’s journey around the world to find out what these things are is interspersed with the stories of how the artifacts came to be there and the people of all three monotheistic religions who cared for the book over the centuries. There’s a reason this book has been a bestseller – it’s got good characters, fascinating settings around the world and through history, and a compelling plot.