In Judaism, the Haggadah is the story of the deliverance of the Israelites from bondage in Egypt and is used during Passover to follow the commandment in the Torah: Tell the story of the exodus to the next generation.

It's the remembrance and celebration of this momentous period in the history of the Jewish people.

In her new novel, Geraldine Brooks fictionalizes the story of the Sarajevo Haggadah, one of the oldest texts extant in Western Europe and one of the most valuable books in the world.

The text was written in 14th-century Spain and miraculously survived the expulsion of the Jews from Iberia, the Spanish Inquisition and, closer to our own time, both the deadly purge of Yugoslavia's Jews by the Nazis as well as the ethnic cleansing in modern Bosnia.

In Brooks' version, Hanna Heath, an Australian rare-book expert, is summoned to Bosnia to analyze and conserve this sacred text. In the process, she discovers curious objects hidden in the binding:

A broken butterfly's wing, a wine stain, salt crystals and a white hair.

Hanna decides she will authenticate each artifact as a way to trace the book's footsteps through time and its passage across countries

Brooks uses the artifacts as a literary device to present a tapestry of "what might have been tales," giving the reader a rich and vivid sense of how and why each object came to be hidden in the pages of the treasured book as well as the story of the person who protected the book.

Unfortunately, she can only speculate on what must have happened. Based on historical fact but fortified by fiction, these tales showcase the power, magic and intelligence of Brooks' writing.

In every "tale," she is able to convey the sense of place, be it Spain in 1490 or Bosnia in 1944, as well as the struggles and beliefs and how their individual predicaments provide the Haggadah with its own story to tell and retell.

The text, of course, unwittingly tells the era in which it was created and the times through which it has existed. Brooks engulfs herself in the past, using details that highlight man's inhumanity to man and man's consistent ability to do such evil in the name of religious glory and dogma.

Brooks, a former war correspondent for the Wall Street Journal, was in Bosnia during the siege of Sarajevo, and her ability to successfully render painful and detailed moments of horrible suffering and loss is everywhere apparent in these narratives.

She won the Pulitzer Prize for her 2005 novel, "March," which rendered Louise May Alcott's beloved "Little Women" from the point of view of the Rev. March, the father of the girls.

One wishes Brooks had developed more of a narrative urgency in Hanna's search and her involvement in the Haggadah's definition. The novel's flaw is that Hanna's story must unfold forward. She cannot interact with those people who knew the book before she did or of their selfless acts in attempting to save it.

Brooks provides personal struggles for Hanna to overcome: She has a terrible relationship with her mother, she discovers the identity of her father and learns of awful secrets surrounding his death.

She succumbs to criticism revealing the fragility of her professional life and has problems with intimacy that make relationships impossible. All of these issues might have been provocative, but they pale in comparison to the struggles of a character being tortured for his idolatry or for a woman whose whole family's fate has been sealed by their capture by the Nazis.

Hanna's story is contrived and implausible when compared to any of the characters from the created history. Her problems don't intertwine with the story of the Haggadah and, by the end, are simply a distraction rather than something that intrigues the reader enough to turn the page.

Brooks' exploration and creation on what might have happened to the Haggadah is the heart of the matter here, and the stories she tells about its perseverance and preservation are stunning and certainly worth the "telling."