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When Geraldine Brooks won the Pulitzer Prize for her novel "March" in 2006, she wasn't the only person in her household to win the prestigious award.

Her husband, Tony Horwitz, also won a Pulitzer in 1995 for journalism.

Despite the fact that the two of them now share the highest honor a writer can receive in America, the Australia native jokes that she never needed the award to have equal footing in their household.

"It's nice to have 'his' and 'hers,' but to tell you the truth, our marriage has never worked with that," Brooks says with a laugh. "We've always let one person's success be the other's, so it wasn't like I felt like this was on our to-do list."

And though Brooks says winning the Pulitzer Prize has not made her job as a novelist any easier, she recently followed her acclaimed success with "People of the Book." Released in late December, the book follows the life of conservationist Hanna Heath as she examines and unravels the mysteries of the Sarajevo Haggadah, one of the oldest illuminated Hebrew texts in the world.

Brooks will promote the release by hosting a reading and lecture at Salem College on Jan. 13.

Having worked as a foreign correspondent for the Wall Street Journal for eight years, Brooks first heard of the real-life Haggadah while reporting from the siege of Sarajevo during the mid-'90s.

"Around the bar at the Holiday Inn, which was the only functioning hotel during the war, the reporters would sit together at the end of the day, and the talk turned to this missing treasure from the Bosnian National Collections," Brooks says.

Rumors circulated at the time that the Muslim government sold the 500-year-old manuscript or that it was taken by Mossad agents back to Israel.

"Sometime after that, the real story of what had happened was revealed, and that was even more interesting than the speculation, which was that a Muslim librarian had risked his life under intense shelling to bring this book to a safe hiding place during the first days of the war in the city, " Brooks says.

Similar stories of heroic empathy and kindness for people of different world views can be found throughout "People of the Book." As Hanna, one of the characters, discovers various clues left inside the Haggadah such as a butterfly wing, a white hair or crystallized salt, the novel segues into stories of how the book was rescued and preserved long ago by other non-Jews, including a Catholic inquisitor.

This message of tolerance is one Brooks regrets mankind as a whole has failed to learn despite centuries of violent wars.

"I think we've got this kind of thickness in the human soul, where from time to time in our history, we forget everything we've learned and start demonizing otherness," Brooks says. "Whether it's religion, race or nationality, these things tend to bubble up in the human psyche through the millennia, and we never seem to learn that this is a mistake because of the destruction that happens at those times takes sometimes centuries to repair."

She later adds: "What unites us is greater than what divides us, and those are the stories I feel drawn to tell, why some are able to see that while others get sucked into that frenzy of hate."

Brooks recently started work on a new novel, which she describes as another story set during a time of catastrophe near her current home in Martha's Vineyard. And even though this will be the Pulitzer Prize winner's sixth book, she says her job hasn't gotten any easier.

"The writing is still what it always was, which is this kind of battle with the blinking cursor," Brooks says. "That doesn't change."

 

Joe Scott is a freelance contributor. Contact him at movieshowjoe@gmail.com.

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