The Golem's Eye

Jonathan Stroud's The Golem's Eye, a children's novel of alternate history and magic, is the middle part of his Bartimaeus trilogy. It appeared in 2004 and made the New York Times best-seller list that year.

The series is set in something close to the modern world, except that magic is commonplace and the people who practise it have most of the offices worth having. The books are about the power struggles inside that magical order, and they mix the ancient with the modern and the mythological with the secular; readers have described the result as a darker and more political cousin of Harry Potter.

This volume takes its name from the eye of a golem, a cyclops-like magical object that, together with an animating parchment, wakes the clay figure and sends it walking. The trilogy is built around the relationship between a young apprentice magician and the djinni he summons, whose view of his masters is considerably less respectful than the one they hold of themselves, and much of the comedy comes from the gap between those two accounts of the same events.