PEOPLE OF THE BOOK, by Geraldine Brooks, is reviewed by Jonathan Yardley in the Washington Post. Excerpts:

Now, in a similar vein, we have Geraldine Brooks's People of the Book. The good news is that this new novel by the author of March, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2006, is intelligent, thoughtful, gracefully written and original. Brooks has built upon her experience as a correspondent in Bosnia for the Wall Street Journal to construct a story around a book -- small, rare and very old -- and the people into whose hands it had fallen over five centuries, people who "had known unbearable stress: pogrom, Inquisition, exile, genocide, war."

The people are inventions, but the book itself is very real: "The Sarajevo Haggadah, created in medieval Spain, was a famous rarity, a lavishly illuminated Hebrew manuscript made at a time when Jewish belief was firmly against illustrations of any kind. It was thought that the commandment in Exodus 'Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image or likeness of any thing' had suppressed figurative art by medieval Jews. When the book came to light in Sarajevo in 1894, its pages of painted miniatures had turned this idea on its head and caused art history texts to be rewritten." Now it is 1996. The book has survived the wartime violence in Bosnia because the head of the library at the National Museum in Sarajevo, a Muslim, saved it from almost certain destruction by hiding it "in a safe-deposit box in the vault of the central bank." Hanna Heath, a 30-year-old Australian book conservator, has been called in by the United Nations to inspect its conditions and repair it as necessary.

[...]

As to the ending of People of the Book, well, that's for you to find out. Suffice it to say that it's a book that resides comfortably in a place we too often imagine to be a no-man's land between popular fiction and literature. Brooks tells a believable and engaging story about sympathetic but imperfect characters -- "popular" fiction demands all of that -- but she also does the business of literature, exploring serious themes and writing about them in handsome prose. She appears to be finding readers and admirers in growing numbers, and People of the Book no doubt will increase those numbers.

Earlier reviews are noted here.