God's Snake — Irini Spanidou

“Remarkably fresh and vigorous . . . an impressive achievement.” -- The New York Times Book Review
 
Set amid the arid landscape and stony resentments of Greece in the aftermath of its bloody civil war, this electrifying novel unfolds a series of interconnecting modern-day fables about childhood and family, love and betrayal. God's Snake is the story of the inventive, courageous Anna, a young girl who has inherited both the skepticism of classical Athens and the fierce stoicism of Sparta. It is also the story of Anna's parents: her mother, a woman as remote as she is seductive, and her father, a misogynist army officer who, when Anna cries, tells her, “we are not born to be comforted.”
 
As Anna picks her way through this emotional minefield, she encounters people and animals that possess the revelatory powers of figures in a dream: the snakes her father's adjutant kills as emissaries of the Devil, a poetry-loving general; a haunted girl whose mother dies of tuberculosis; a frozen crow that miraculously comes back to life, God's Snake is a work filled with passion, magic, and terror, conceived by a novelist of visionary authority.