Helene Wecker has 4 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 4 narrators, with an average listener rating of 4.5★ across 130 ratings. The most-rated is The Golem and the Jinni.
The Golem and the Jinni
Summary
Audie Award Finalist, Fiction, 2014 Helene Wecker's dazzling debut novel tells the story of two supernatural creatures who appear mysteriously in 1899 New York. Chava is a golem, a creature made of clay, brought to life by a strange man who dabbles in dark Kabbalistic magic. When her master dies at sea on the voyage from Poland, she is unmoored and adrift as the ship arrives in New York Harbor. Ahmad is a jinni, 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. Struggling to make their way in this strange new place, the Golem and the Jinni try to fit in with their neighbors while masking their true natures. Surrounding them is a community of immigrants: the coffeehouse owner Maryam Faddoul, a pillar of wisdom and support for her Syrian neighbors; the solitary ice cream maker Saleh, a damaged man cursed by tragedy; the kind and caring Rabbi Meyer and his beleaguered nephew, Michael, whose Sheltering House receives newly arrived Jewish men; the adventurous young socialite Sophia Winston; and the enigmatic Joseph Schall, a dangerous man driven by ferocious ambition and esoteric wisdom. Meeting by chance, the two creatures become 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 menace will soon bring the Golem and the Jinni together again, threatening their existence and forcing them to make a fateful choice. Marvelous and compulsively listenable, The Golem and the Jinni weaves strands of folk mythology, historical fiction, and magical fable into a wondrously inventive and unforgettable tale.
©2013 Helene Wecker (P)2013 HarperCollins Publishers
Divestment
Summary
New York Times best-selling author Helene Wecker (The Golem and the Jinni) brings us inside the disintegrating mind of a German-Jewish grandmother in this sometimes chilling, sometimes heartwarming, consistently riveting story. When Gerda Kohl moves from the home in which she raised her family to a posh new retirement center, she must decide what to take with her and what to leave behind. This includes not only photographs, furniture, and mementos but weightier items, too - warring daughters, rebellious grandchildren, and the ghosts of a past that seems increasingly more real than the present.
©2015 Helene Wecker (P)2016 Audible, Inc.
Golem und Dschinn
Summary
New York, 1899: Zwei magische Kreaturen gelangen in das Zentrum der Neuen Welt. Chava ist ein Golem, ein Geschöpf aus Ton - Ahmad ein Wesen aus Feuer, ein Dschinn, der nach tausendjähriger Gefangenschaft endlich aus seiner Flasche darf. Beide irren verloren durch die Straßen der Stadt auf der Suche nach Freundschaft und ihrer eigenen Identität. Als sich ihre Wege kreuzen, entsteht bald eine tiefe Zuneigung. Doch ihr Glück ist bedroht, als ein mächtiger Feind auftaucht, der es auf die übernatürlichen Kräfte der beiden abgesehen hat. Ein Roman wie aus 1001 Nacht, märchenhaft und voller Poesie - gelesen von Boris Aljinovic.
©2013 Hoffmann und Campe GmbH (P)2013 DAV
The Hidden Palace
Summary
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 best seller 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. Chava 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. Ahmad is a jinni, a perpetually restless and free-spirited creature of fire, imprisoned in the shape of a man. 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. 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. Each has unwittingly affected the humans around them. 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. There she meets a tempestuous female jinni who’s been banished from her tribe. 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. Spanning the tumultuous years from the turn of the 20th century to the beginning of World War I, The Hidden Palace follows these lives and others as they collide and interleave. 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?
©2021 Helene Wecker (P)2021 HarperCollins Publishers