God Is Dead, By Ron Currie

In the first of the vivid, discrete narratives which comprise this satirical smart bomb of a debut novel, God comes to earth in the form of a young Sudanese woman and is unfortunately killed by the Janjaweed. The news that he's dead is later relayed to the world by the scavenging dogs which, since feeding on his corpse, are able to talk.

What happens over the ensuing decades is consistently surprising, but consistent, too, with a grim logic and with what we know about our species' fallibilities and foibles. There are the initial predictable waves of civil disorder and mass suicide. The priests are the first to go. But then society is resurrected. Characters still love one another as they love themselves. People find new objects of worship – dogs and children. Then war breaks out between the Evolutionary Psychologists and the Postmodern Anthropologists.

God Is Dead exists in an imaginative realm of the extreme and improbable, but like all potent satires, also very perceptive about us as we are here and now.