This novel traces the roots of a remarkable book, the Sarajevo Haggadah, through several hundred years of history. More importantly, it brings the creators of the book to novelistic life through the imagination of the author. It also tells a taut, dramatic story about the restoration of the book in the modern era, centering around a young fictional Australian expert named Hanna Heath. Hanna's story could stand alone as a novel all its own, and it provides quite a bit of drama in the end parts of the novel. It also allows us to see the survival of the book through to contemporary times, and that it is always more complicated than we would expect for something like the Haggadah to survive. The "people of the book" are Christian, Muslim, and Jewish, and the survival of the Sarajevo Haggadah tells of the complex interplay between these faiths. First of all, the book is Jewish, but it is illustrated in a style influenced by Christian prayer books, or books of hours. It ended up in the hands of Muslim caretakers, and the novel ultimately traces the art back to a Muslim source, although that supposition is not proven as it would be in a non-fiction work. The creators and preservers of the book come into the book through artifacts that are found in the binding or on the pages when Hanna restores the book -- she finds a butterfly wing, for example, that leads into a story of survival during the Nazi era.
