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.