View our feature on Geraldine Books’s Folks of the Book.

Through the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer of March, the journey of a rare illuminated manuscript through centuries of exile and war

In 1996, Hanna Heath, an Australian rare-book expert, is offered the job of an eternity: evaluation and conservation from the famed Sarajevo Haggadah, which has been rescued from Serb shelling during the Bosnian war. Priceless and beautiful, the book is one of the earliest Jewish amounts ever to be illuminated about Folks of the Publication: A Novel with pictures. When Hanna, a caustic loner having a passion on her behalf work, discovers a series of small artifacts in its historic binding-an insect wing fragment, wines stains, sodium crystals, a white hair-she starts to unlock the book’s mysteries. The audience is normally ushered into an exquisitely detailed and atmospheric past, tracing the book’s trip from its salvation back to its creation.

In Bosnia during Globe War II, female risks his life to protect it through the Nazis. In the hedonistic salons of fin-de-siècle Vienna, the reserve turns into a pawn in the struggle against the city’s rising anti-Semitism. In inquisition-era Venice, a Catholic priest saves it from burning. In Barcelona in 1492, the scribe who composed the text views his family demolished by the agonies of enforced exile. And in Seville in 1480, the reason behind the Haggadah’s remarkable illuminations is certainly finally disclosed. Hanna’s investigation unexpectedly plunges her in to the intrigues of artwork forgers and ultra-nationalist fanatics. Her encounters will test her perception in herself and the man she has come to love.

Inspired by a genuine story, Folks of the Book reaches once a novel of sweeping historical grandeur and close emotional intensity, an ambitious, electrifying work by an acclaimed and beloved author.