Richard Neville

mother and her young daughter Leah, the mother realises that she's not going to survive, you know, just sees horrible.

And I think one of the interesting things that when we think about the Holocaust, we tend to think about the camps, yet it's actually what comes before the camps and the kind of slowly compressing bureaucracy and horror that was being inflicted upon Jewish people.

And so it's kind of starts really from that premise.

They know they have to flee.

Leah's mum knows she has to get out of Berlin, otherwise they're all going to die.

And they're all profoundly Jewish and wrapped up in that whole kind of Jewish mythology.

And so she decides the only way she's going to be able to get her daughter out of Berlin and send her to Paris, where she has cousins, is to create something she calls a golem, which is a kind of mythical creature that has a human form but has no soul, has no kind of other human attributes.

So they go to a rabbi who refuses to do it, or his wife refuses to do it, and a young girl called Etty has learnt her father's chants and spells.

So they get some clay and water and create this golem, a woman called

ava and ava and lee and the book is really about ava and lee or this kind of sense of magical realism meets history and initially it's quite a kind of i didn't know what i was going to think of it um but it really begins to pull together in the end and i certainly felt ava becomes his savior and she has these powers which means that lee yeah ava becomes this person who you know is going to protect lee's every time lee that just the danger that lee is about to face you think oh

you kind of form a bond between the two of them because Ava is the person who is going to save her.

She is the kind of surrogate mother.

Lee's mother says to the golem, says to Ava, your job is to get her to Paris and protect her and save her.

And that's the only obligation Ava has as a golem.

Well, I think because what they're facing... When I started to get into it, I suppose, I began to see the golem as... What they're going through is just so unimaginable, so awful, that really the creation of a golem is almost like something that you might bring into your own subconscious as a way of trying to cope with as a kind of coping and understanding mechanism.

I mean, I think it is interesting.

A lot of it is about kind of built around the Jewish faith and its myths and its customs and so on.

He's constant throughout the novel.

He's always sitting, looking over Lee and the golem to decide whether or not he's going to jump in and take one of them and kind of cheating.

The angel of death is a big part of the novel.