Much of the novel leisurely follows Chava and Ahmad’s explorations of the new world, while each tries to come to terms with their own curious and alien lot. What a place it would have seemed to the immigrants of the earliest 20th century, and its strangeness and wonder is intensified as we witness it through the eyes and experiences of two beings from another world entirely. The Golem and the Djinni is a remarkable novel, haunting and mesmerising with the most beautiful prose and alive with perfectly drawn characters, including the character of New York City itself. Ahmad also never sleeps, instead he explores by night this magical city, protecting himself with an umbrella from the rain that would quench his spirit. He works for the metalworker, heating the metal with his bare hands, becoming a part of the Christian community of New York. Ahmad is freed from the flask by a metalworker but an iron band around his wrist enslaves him in human form. He is a creature of fire, a djinni born in the Syrian desert hundreds and hundreds of years before, able to take many forms, but trapped in a brass flask by a wizard of immense evil powers. She finds refuge of a sort with a kindly, elderly rabbi and she becomes part of the New York Jewish community, endlessly working, baking and sewing, never needing to sleep or eat, quietly searching for a purpose.Īcross the city, Ahmad awakes. On docking, she jumps into the sea and walks to the city underneath the water, dragging seaweed wrapped round her boots. But upon being woken aboard the ship sailing from the old world her husband dies, leaving her as alone as one ever could be in a foreign world.

A creature made from clay, life breathed in to her through spells, binding her to the man who wakes her. Not all newcomers, though, are as they seem. It is 1899 and immigration to New York City is at its height.

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The golem and the djinni