Can Chava and Ahmad find their places in the human world while remaining true to each other? Or will their opposing natures and desires eventually tear them apart-especially once they encounter, thrillingly, other beings like themselves?Ģ014 Mythopoeic Award for Adult Literature winner ✦ 2014 VCU Cabell First Novelist Award winner ✦ 2014 Harold U. Spanning the tumultuous years from the turn of the twentieth century to the beginning of World War I, The Hidden Palace follows these lives and others as they collide and interleave. Back in New York, in a tenement on the Lower East Side, a little girl named Kreindel helps her rabbi father build a golem they name Yossele-not knowing that she’s about to be sent to an orphanage uptown, where the hulking Yossele will become her only friend and protector. There she meets a tempestuous female jinni who’s been banished from her tribe. Park Avenue heiress Sophia Winston, whose brief encounter with Ahmad left her with a strange illness that makes her shiver with cold, travels to the Middle East to seek a cure.

Having encountered each other under calamitous circumstances, Chava and Ahmad’s lives are now entwined-but they’re not yet certain of what they mean to each other.Įach has unwittingly affected the humans around them. Fearing they’ll be exposed as monsters, these magical beings hide their true selves and pretend to be human-just two more immigrants in the bustling world of 1900s Manhattan. Ahmad is a jinni, a perpetually restless and free-spirited creature of fire, imprisoned in the shape of a man. In this enthralling historical epic, set in New York City and the Middle East in the years leading to World War I- the long-awaited follow-up to the acclaimed New York Times bestseller The Golem and the Jinni-Helene Wecker revisits her beloved characters Chava and Ahmad as they confront unexpected new challenges in a rapidly changing human world.Ĭhava is a golem, a woman made of clay, able to hear the thoughts and longings of the people around her and compelled by her nature to help them.

The hidden palace wecker