Michael Henderson suggests

Email registration

Free weekly email update

Great products and special offers for Spectator readers

Click here for great value events

Click here for exclusive articles, offers, tasting notes and discussion

A choice of first novels

Archie Bland

Wednesday, 5th December 2007

A selection of works from new authors

Rarely has Nietzsche been taken so literally as in Ron Currie’s God Is Dead (Picador, £12.99), wherein the deity adopts the form of a Sudanese refugee woman called Sora, and is blown to physical and metaphysical bits by a Janjaweed bomb. Just before He dies, He wishes for someone he could pray to.

That’s chapter one. Thereafter, everything goes to pot. In lieu of any religious ideology to fight over, war breaks out between the adherents of evolutionary psychology and postmodern anthropology. Africans worship the omniscient dogs that picked at Sora’s corpse; Americans adore toddlers, ‘tangible, blameless, and as cute as all hell’; the government struggles to keep people from spending their grocery money on multiple sets of Hungry Hippos. And yet, as the book’s flyleaf is at pains to make clear: even without God, life goes on.

Print this article | Email to a friend | Permalink | Comment | Apollo Art Books

1 | 2 | 3 Next page

Post this entry to: del.icio.us | Digg | Newsvine | NowPublic | Reddit

Deadlier than the male

Andrew Taylor

When does a novel stop being a novel and become a crime story? It’s often assumed that there is an unbridgeable gap between them, but that’s not necessarily so.