The Golem

About this book

In Prague's Jewish quarter, a man wakes with gaps in his memory and a sense that his identity may belong to someone else. Rumours of the legendary Golem drift through the alleys while a sequence of troubling encounters unsettles the life of Athanasius Pernath.

Gustav Meyrink's novel is a labyrinth of dreams, double lives, occult symbols and uncertain perceptions. Its crowded houses and dim streets seem to absorb the anxieties of their inhabitants. The old clay creature is less a conventional monster than a recurring mystery, one that makes the boundary between the city's legends and Pernath's mind difficult to locate.