41 pages 1 hour read

Geraldine Brooks

People of the Book

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2008

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Chapter 7Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 7 Summary: “Hanna: Boston, Spring 1996”

Hanna gets dinner with Raz, and they talk shop. His wife is out of town. Later, Raz suggests they go to bed together, and Hanna is appalled and brushes him off. Later, she has a sexual dream about Ozren.

Hanna wakes up to a phone call in her hotel room. It is a doctor from the ER. He tells her that her mother has been in a car accident and is in critical condition. She has a bleed in her spleen, fainted, and is now in surgery. The other woman, Delilah Sharansky, was dead on arrival. Hanna rushes to the hospital to find her mother coming out of surgery. Then, after talking to her mother for a brief period of time, Sarah Heath reveals that Delilah Sharansky was Hanna’s grandmother. She tells Hanna to go a house in Brookline to sit shiva and meet the family she has never known.

Hanna goes to house to sit shiva, meeting many relatives she never knew, but not before getting the story of her father from her sick mother. Her father was named Aaron Sharansky, and he died from a brain tumor and bleeding caused by neurosurgery. Aaron was a painter and scholar and left his estate to Delilah and Sarah to connect them after his death.