People of the Book is the new novel from Vineyard Haven author Geraldine Brooks — her first since March won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. It hits stores on Tuesday and will be launched on Thursday with a special public reading at the Martha’s Vineyard Hebrew Center. A longtime foreign correspondent for the Wall Street Journal, Ms. Brooks was inspired by the true story of a mysterious codex known as the Sarajevo Haggadah.

This rare illuminated Hebrew manuscript emerged from convivencia Spain to make a series of perilous journeys through history: through Inquisition-era Venice, fin-de-siecle Vienna, and the Nazi sacking of Sarajevo.

In this excerpt from the new novel, it is 1996 and Hanna Heath, an Australian rare-book expert, is beginning the job of a lifetime: analysis and conservation of the famed manuscript, which has been rescued once again from Serb shelling during the Bosnian war.

Sarajevo, Spring 1996

— unspecified

As many times as I’ve worked on rare, beautiful things, that first touch is always a strange and powerful sensation. It’s a combination between brushing a live wire and stroking the back of a newborn baby’s head.

No conservator had handled this manuscript for a century. I had the forms positioned, ready. I hesitated for just a second — a Hebrew book, therefore spine to the right — and laid it in the cradling foam.

Until you opened it, the book was nothing that an untrained eye would look twice at. It was small, for one thing, convenient for use at the Passover dinner table. Its binding was of an ordinary 19th century style, soiled and scuffed. A codex as gorgeously illustrated as this one would originally have had an elaborate binding. You don’t make filet mignon then serve it on a paper plate. The binder might have used gold leaf or silver tooling, maybe inlays of ivory or pearl shell. But this book had probably been rebound many times in its long life. The only one we knew about for sure, because it had been documented, was the last time, in Vienna in the 1890s. Unfortunately, the book had been terribly mishandled in that instance. The Austrian binder had cropped the parchment heavily and discarded the old binding — something no one, especially not a professional working for a major museum — would ever do anymore. It was impossible to say what information might have been lost at that time. He had rebound the parchments in simple cardboard covers with an inappropriate Turkish printed floral paper decoration, now faded and discolored. Only the corners and spine were calfskin, and this was dark brown and flaking away, exposing the edge of the gray board beneath.

I ran my middle finger lightly along the cracked corners. These I would consolidate over the coming days. As my finger followed the edges of the board, I noticed something unexpected. The binder had made a pair of channels and a set of small holes in the board edge to accept a pair of clasps. It was usual for books of parchment to have clasps, to hold the pages flat. Yet there were no clasps on this binding. I made a note to myself to investigate this.

Moving the forms to support the spine, I opened the cover and leaned close to examine the torn endpapers. I would mend these with wheat paste and shreds of matching linen paper. I could see at once that the linen cords the Viennese binder had used were frayed, barely holding. That meant I would have to take the quires apart and restitch them. Then I breathed deeply and turned the page to the parchment of the manuscript itself. This was what mattered; this was what would disclose what four hard years had done to a survivor of five centuries.

The snow light flared on brightness. Blue: intense as a midsummer sky, obtained from grinding precious lapis lazuli carried by camel caravan all the way from the mountains of Afghanistan. White: pure, creamy, opaque. Less glamorous, more complicated than the blue. At that time it would still have been made according to the method discovered by ancient Egyptians. You cover lead bars with the dregs of old wine and seal them up in a shed full of animal dung. I’d done it once, in my mother’s greenhouse in Bellevue Hill. She’d had a load of manure delivered, and I couldn’t resist. The acid in the vinegary wine converts lead to its acetate, which in turn combines with the carbon dioxide released by the dung to make basic white lead carbonate, PbCO3. My mother pitched a fit about it, of course. Said she couldn’t stand to go near her bloody prize orchids for weeks.

I turned a page. More dazzle. The illuminations were beautiful, but I didn’t allow myself to look at them as art. Not yet. First I had to understand them as chemicals. There was yellow, made of saffron. That beautiful autumn flower, Crocus sativus Linnaeus, each with just three tiny precious stigmas, had been a prized luxury then and remained one, still. Even if we now know that the rich color comes from a carotene, crocin, with a molecular structure of 44 carbon, 64 hydrogen, and 24 oxygen, we still haven’t synthesized a substitute as complex and as beautiful. There was malachite green, and red; the intense red known as worm scarlet — tola’at shani in Hebrew — extracted from tree-dwelling insects, crushed up and boiled in lye. Later, when alchemists learned how to make a similar red from sulfur and mercury, they still named the color “little worm” — vermiculum. Some things don’t change: we call it vermilion even today.

Change. That’s the enemy. Books do best when temperature, humidity, the whole environment, stay the same. You could hardly get more dramatic changes than this book had been through: moved under extreme difficulties and without preparation or precaution, exposed to wild swings of temperature. I’d been worried that the parchment might have shrunk, the pigments cracked and lifted. But the colors had held fast, as pure and as vivid as the day the paint was applied. Unlike the leaf on the spine, which had flaked away, the burnished gold of the illuminations was fresh and blazing. The gilder of five hundred years ago had definitely had a better grasp of his trade than the more modern Viennese bookbinder. There was silver leaf also. This had oxidized and turned dark gray, as you would expect.

“Will you be replacing that?” It was the thin young man from the museum. He was pointing at a distinct area of tarnish. He was standing too close. Because parchment is flesh, human bacteria can degrade it. I moved my shoulder so that he had to withdraw his hand and take a step backward.

“No,” I said. “Absolutely not.” I did not look up.

“But you’re a restorer; I thought . . .”

“Conservator,” I corrected. The last thing I wanted right then was a long discussion on the philosophy of book conservation. “Look,” I said, “you’re here; I’m instructed that you have to be here, but I’d appreciate it if you didn’t interrupt my work.”

“I understand,” he said, his voice gentle after my abrasiveness. “But you must also understand: I am the kustos, the book is in my care.”

Journey of the book as imagined by Ms. Brooks. — unspecified

Kustos . It took a minute to sink in. I turned then, and stared at him. “You can’t be Ozren Karaman? The one who saved the book?”

The UN rep, Sajjan, sprang up, all apologies. “I am sorry, I should have made the introduction. But you were so anxious to get to work. I — Dr. Hanna Heath, please may I present Dr. Ozren Karaman, chief librarian of the National Museum and professor of librarianship at the National University of Bosnia.”

“I — Sorry, that was rude of me,” I said. “I expected that you’d be much older, to be chief curator of such a major collection.” I also didn’t expect a person in that position to look quite so disheveled. He was wearing a scuffed leather jacket over a crumpled white T-shirt. His jeans were frayed. His hair — wild, curly, neither combed nor cut — flopped over a pair of glasses that were mended in the middle with a bit of duct tape.

He raised an eyebrow. “You yourself, of course, being so very advanced in years, would have every reason to think that.” He kept a perfectly straight face as he said this. I guessed he was about thirty, like me. “But I would be very pleased, Dr. Heath, if you could spare a moment to say what you have in mind to do.” He shot Sajjan a glance as he said this, and in it I could read a volume. The UN thought it was doing Bosnia a favor, funding the work so that the Haggadah could be properly displayed. But when it comes to national treasures, no one wants outsiders calling the shots. Ozren Karaman clearly felt he’d been sidelined. The last thing I wanted was to get involved in any of that. I was here to care for a book, not some librarian’s bruised ego. Still, he had a right to know why the UN had chosen someone like me.

“I can’t say exactly the extent of my work till I’ve thoroughly inspected the manuscript, but here’s the thing: no one hires me looking for chemical cleanups or heavy restorations. I’ve written too many papers knocking that approach. To restore a book to the way it was when it was made is to lack respect for its history. I think you have to accept a book as you receive it from past generations, and to a certain extent damage and wear reflect that history. The way I see it, my job is to make it stable enough to allow safe handling and study, repairing only where absolutely necessary. This, here,” I said, pointing to a page where a russet stain bloomed over the fiery Hebrew calligraphy, “I can take a microscopic sample of those fibers, and we can analyze them, and maybe learn what made that stain — wine would be my first guess. But a full analysis might provide clues as to where the book was at the time it happened. And if we can’t tell now, then in fifty, a hundred years, when lab techniques have advanced, my counterpart in the future will be able to. But if I chemically erased that stain — that so-called damage — we’d lose the chance at that knowledge forever.” I took a deep breath.

Ozren Karaman was looking at me with a bemused expression. I suddenly felt embarrassed. “Sorry, you know all that, of course. But it’s a bit of an obsession with me, and once I get started...” I was only digging a deeper hole, so I stopped. “The thing is, they’ve given me only a week’s access to the book, so I really need every minute. I’d like to get started. I’ll have it till six this evening, yes?”

“No, not quite. I’ll need to take it about ten minutes before the hour, to get it secured before the bank guards change shifts.”

“All right,” I said, drawing my chair in close. I inclined my head to the other end of the long table where the security detachment sat. “Any chance we could get rid of a few of them?”

He shook his uncombed head. “I’m afraid we’ll all be staying.”

I couldn’t help the sigh that escaped me. My work has to do with objects, not people. I like matter, fiber, the nature of the varied stuffs that go to make a book. I know the flesh and fabrics of pages, the bright earths and lethal toxins of ancient pigments. Wheat paste — I can bore the pants off anyone about wheat paste. I spent six months in Japan, learning how to mix it for just the necessary amount of tension.

Parchment, especially, I love. So durable it can last for centuries, so fragile it can be destroyed in a careless instant. One of the reasons, I’m sure, that I got this job was because I have written so many journal articles on parchment. I could tell, just from the size and scatter of the pore holes, that the parchments in front of me had been made from the skin of a now-extinct breed of thick-haired Spanish mountain sheep. You can date manuscripts from the kingdoms of Aragon and Castile to within a hundred years or so if you know when that particular breed was all the go with the local parchment makers.

Parchment is leather, essentially, but it looks and feels different because the dermal fibers in the skin have been reorganized by stretching. Wet it, and the fibers revert to their original, three-dimensional network. I had worried about condensation within the metal box, or exposure to the elements during transport. But there was very little sign of either. There were some pages that showed signs of older water damage, but under the microscope I saw a rime of cube-shaped crystals that I recognized: NaCl, also known as plain old table salt. The water that had damaged this book was probably the saltwater used at the seder table to represent the tears of the slaves in Egypt.

Of course, a book is more than the sum of its materials. It is an artifact of the human mind and hand. The gold beaters, the stone grinders, the scribes, the binders, those are the people I feel most comfortable with. Sometimes, in the quiet, these people speak to me. They let me see what their intentions were, and it helps me do my work. I worried that the kustos, with his well-meaning scrutiny, or the cops, with the low chatter of their radios, would keep my friendly ghosts at bay. And I needed their help. There were so many questions.

For a start, most books like this, rich in such expensive pigments, had been made for palaces or cathedrals. But a Haggadah is used only at home. The word is from the Hebrew root hgd , “to tell,” and it comes from the biblical command that instructs parents to tell their children the story of the Exodus. This “telling” varies widely, and over the centuries each Jewish community has developed its own variations on this home-based celebration.

But no one knew why this Haggadah was illustrated with numerous miniature paintings, at a time when most Jews considered figurative art a violation of the commandments. It was unlikely that a Jew would have been in a position to learn the skilled painting techniques evinced here. The style was not unlike the work of Christian illuminators. And yet, most of the miniatures illustrated biblical scenes as interpreted in the Midrash, or Jewish biblical exegesis.

I turned the parchment and suddenly found myself gazing at the illustration that had provoked more scholarly speculation than all the others. It was a domestic scene. A family of Jews — Spanish, by their dress — sits at a Passover meal. We see the ritual foods, the matzoh to commemorate the unleavened bread that the Hebrews baked in haste on the night before they fled Egypt, a shank bone to remember the lamb’s blood on the doorposts that had caused the angel of death to “pass over” Jewish homes. The father, reclining as per custom, to show that he is a free man and not a slave, sips wine from a golden goblet as his small son, beside him, raises a cup. The mother sits serenely in the fine gown and jeweled headdress of the day. Probably the scene is a portrait of the family who commissioned this particular haggadah. But there is another woman at the table, ebony-skinned and saffron-robed, holding a piece of matzoh. Too finely dressed to be a servant, and fully participating in the Jewish rite, the identity of that African woman in saffron has perplexed the book’s scholars for a century.

Seville, 1480

We do not feel the sun here. Even after the passage of years, that is still the hardest thing for me. At home, I lived in brightness. Heat baked the yellow earth and dried the roof thatch until it crackled.

Here, the stone and tile are cool always, even at midday. Light steals in among us like an enemy, fingering its narrow way through the lattices or falling from the few high panes in dulled fragments of emerald and ruby.

It is hard to do my work in such light. I must be always moving the page to get a small square of adequate brightness, and this constant fidgeting breaks my concentration. I set down my brush and stretch my hands. The boy beside me rises unbidden and goes to fetch the sherbet girl. She is new here, in the house of Netanel ha-Levi, and I wonder how he came by her. Perhaps, like me, she was the gift of some grateful patient. If so, a generous one. She is a skilled servant, gliding across the tiles silent as silk. I nod, and she kneels, pouring a rust-colored liquid that I do not recognize. “It is pomegranate,” she says, in an unfamiliar tribal accent. She has green eyes, like agate stone, but her skin gleams with the tones of some southern land. As she bends over the goblet, the cloth at her throat falls away and I note that her neck is the golden brown of a bruised peach. I puzzle on what hues I would combine to render this. The sherbet is good; she has mixed it so that the tartness of the fruit still tells beneath the syrup.

“God bless your hands,” I say as she rises.

“May the blessings be abundant as rain upon your own,”’ she murmurs. Then I see her eyes widen as they fall upon my work. As she turns, her lips begin to move, and though her accent makes it difficult to be sure, I think that the prayer she whispers is of a different import entirely. I look down at my tablet then and try to see my work as it must appear to her. The doctor gazes back at me, his head tilted and his hand raised, fingering the curl of his beard as he does when he considers some matter that interests him. I have him, there is no doubt of it. It is an excellent likeness. One might say he lives.

No wonder the girl looked startled. It puts me in mind of my own astonishment when Hooman first showed me the likenesses in the paintings that had enraged the iconoclasts. But it is Hooman who would be astonished if he could see me now: me, a Muslim, in the service of a Jew. He did not think he was training me for such a fate. For myself, I have grown accustomed to it. At first, when I came here, I felt ashamed to be enslaved to a Jew. But now my shame is only that I am a slave. And it is the Jew, himself, who has taught me to feel this.

Reprinted by arrangement with Viking, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., from People of the Book Copyright © Geraldine Brooks, 2008.

Geraldine Brooks will discuss and sign copies of People of the Book on Jan. 3 at 7 p.m. the Hebrew Center in Vineyard Haven. Free and all welome.