God's Snake

This electrifying novel -- vastly praised upon its first publication in 1986 -- is set amid the arid landscape and stony resentments of postwar Greece. God's Snake reveals the drama of an inventive, courageous young girl and her parents -- a tyrannical army officer and his beautiful, unyielding wife -- as it unfolds with the intensity of a classical myth, one that demonstrates both the power of love and the terrible inevitability of its betrayal.

As Anna indefatigably tries to claim her parents' affections, she encounters people and animals that suggest the figures of a revelatory dream: murdered snakes, a poetry-loving general, a beautiful girl with a tubercular mother, a loving dog that dies of cruelty and neglect, a frozen crow that comes back to life. Filled with passion, magic, and terror, God's Snake is a triumph by a writer of visionary authority.