A clay giant miraculously brought to life by a saintly rabbi saves a Jewish banker who has been falsely accused in the Prague of Emperor Rudolf II.

Alex, nearly thirteen, flees with his grandfather across snowy Europe to escape the human and mechanical assassins that pursue them, trying to retrieve a powerful object.

Chava is a golem, able to hear the thoughts and longings of the people around her and compelled by her nature to help them. Ahmad is a jinni, a free-spirited creature of fire, imprisoned in the shape of a man. Pretending to be human, they are just two more immigrants in the bustling world of 1900s Manhattan. Park Avenue heiress Sophia Winston, whose brief encounter with Ahmad left her with a strange illness that makes her shiver with cold, travels...

In nineteenth-century England, after her father's disappearance, Nan Sparrow, ten, works as a "climbing boy," aiding chimney sweeps, but when her most treasured possessions end up in a fireplace, she unwittingly creates a golem.