About the Book
Chava
is a golem, a creature made of clay, brought to life by a disgraced rabbi who dabbles in dark Kabbalistic magic. When her master, the husband who commissioned her, dies at sea on the voyage from Poland, she is unmoored and adrift as the ship arrives in New York in 1899.
Ahmad
is a djinni, a being of fire, born in the ancient Syrian desert. Trapped in an old copper flask by a Bedouin wizard centuries ago, he is released accidentally by a tinsmith in a Lower Manhattan shop. Though he is no longer imprisoned, Ahmad is not entirely free – an unbreakable band of iron binds him to the physical world.
The Golem & The Djinni
is their magical, unforgettable story; unlikely friends whose tenuous attachment challenges their opposing natures – until the night a terrifying incident drives them back into their separate worlds. But a powerful threat will soon bring Chava and Ahmad together again, challenging their existence and forcing them to make a fateful choice …
About the Author
Helene Wecker grew up near Chicago, and received her MFA in Creative Writing from Columbia University in New York. Her work has been published in the online magazine Joyland, and she has read from her stories at the KGB Bar in New York and the Barbershop Reading Series in San Francisco. After a dozen years of moving around between both coasts and the Midwest, she now lives near San Francisco with her husband and daughter. The Golem and the Djinni is her first novel.
Praise for The Golem and The Djinni
‘Set against the vivid backdrop of New York City’s immigrant neighbourhoods in the late 19th century, Helene Wecker’s tale of two fabled creatures has the intimate feel of a story handed down from generation to generation. With a delightful blend of the prosaic and the fanciful, The Golem and The Djinni explores what it means to be human as Chava and Ahmad struggle to live and find love while overcoming the powerful adversary who threatens to destroy them’
Deborah Harkness, author of A Discovery of Witches
‘An astonishing debut novel that sweeps us into a gaslit alternate reality rich enough to get lost in – a vision of fin de siècle 19th century New York as a city that had all the world’s immigrants descending on it, including supernatural ones … It is Helene Wecker's triumph that these supernatural beings – one made of fire, the other of clay – seem as real and as poignant in their struggles for love and belonging as any of their fellow human immigrants, until together they face a villain of truly monstrous proportions’
Tom Reiss, author of The Orientalist and The Black Count
HELENE WECKER
For Kareem
Table of Contents
Praise for The Golem and The Djinni
