Plucky Charms

And when she finally went back to "People of the Book" -- which, incidentally, now sits on the national bestseller lists -- she quickly solved the problem of the contemporary curator's voice.

A charmed life? Case closed!

Or maybe not.

It all comes down to your definition of "charmed."

Blank Spaces to Fill In

The idea for "People of the Book" didn't fly through any windows, unless you count mortar holes in the Sarajevo Holiday Inn.

Freezing and lacking electricity as the Bosnian war wound down in the mid-1990s, the hotel was filled nonetheless -- it was the only one still open -- with journalists gossiping in its candle-lit bar. Brooks was there covering U.N. operations. The bar talk turned to the Sarajevo Haggadah, of which she had never heard.

The priceless manuscript, it seemed, was missing. Had the Bosnian government sold it to raise money for arms? Had the Israelis smuggled it out of the country for safekeeping? Brooks made a mental note to check out the rumors, but never did.

After the war, she learned that in 1992, a Muslim librarian had dodged Serbian shells to retrieve the manuscript and had stashed it in a bank vault. When Brooks switched to fiction writing, she brought her fascination with this story along.

Historical fiction works best, she says, if you have some blank spaces to fill in. This was not a problem with the Sarajevo Haggadah, about which the known facts were few and mostly recent.

The most dramatic involved another Muslim librarian, Dervis Korkut, who risked his life to keep the Haggadah out of the hands of Nazi occupiers during World War II. Hearing that a Nazi general was coming to claim the manuscript, Korkut hid it in the waistband of his trousers. He and the director of the Bosnian National Museum then managed to persuade the general that they'd already handed it over to another Nazi. Where the Haggadah really spent the war remained a mystery until Brooks tracked down Korkut's 81-year-old widow and learned that he'd taken it to a remote mountain village and hidden it in a mosque.

Before that are only faint traces and speculation.

The Haggadah was created, scholars believe, in 14th-century Spain, toward the end of the so-called Convivencia -- a period, as Brooks writes in an afterword to "People of the Book," when "Jews, Christians and Muslims coexisted in relative peace." Among the most notable things about the manuscript are its brightly colored illuminations, which caused art historians to reevaluate their belief that medieval Hebrew books deliberately excluded figurative art.