The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay is a novel by the American writer Michael Chabon, published in 2000. It is a historical novel about two Jewish cousins and the comics they make together.

Josef Kavalier is nineteen and Czech, and he arrives in New York in 1939 as a refugee. His cousin Sammy Klayman is seventeen and from Brooklyn, and the two of them live together while Joe tries to find a way to bring his family out of Europe.

What they create is a superhero called the Escapist, whose adventures are shaped by Joe's wish to fight fascism and by his inability to rescue the people he left behind. The two of them become important figures in the comics industry while it is being invented.

The book was a New York Times bestseller and won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2001. Joe's escape from Prague, which he makes with the help of a teacher named Kornblum and in the company of the Golem, is the scene the novel is best known for.