AND in the beginning was Eve, who was a pretty smart kid, resourceful and clever, who had the Serpent for company, the wise, all-knowing Serpent, not a slippery troublemaker.

In the beginning too was Adam, a beautiful boy, nave and athletic, who loved nothing better than racing the gazelles in the morning, who had God for company.

You can't help but feel Adam drew the short straw. God may be the Almighty creator and all that, but he is, well, a bit of an almighty prima donna, and prone to thunderous moments of temper to go along with the wonders of creation.

Having conjured Adam and Eve from the dust or wherever, God grows impatient for his experiment in human chemistry to come to fruition. So he encourages Adam to have sexual urges the boy doesn't yet understand, forcing him on to Eve in what can only be described as an act of rape.

After this moment of desecration, Eve flees with her serpent saviour and is slowly nurtured back to health. She then embarks on a series of adventures outside the Garden, visiting volcanic peaks, deserts and the sea, learning many things on the way, including the existence of death, en route to the apple-biting encounter.

Elsie V. Aidinoff has written a playful and provocative novel which imagines the Garden of Eden in the most vivid, poetically charged way imaginable. This is, in the writer's own words, "a novel, not a work of theology", and one in which themes of personal responsibility, justice and freedom are explored in a way no reader should forget in a hurry.

Updated: 08:55 Saturday, March 04, 2006