Fallen
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4.0 • 3 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
From the internationally acclaimed author of The Preservationist comes a provocative retelling of the story of Eve and Adam, Abel and Cain---a novel of temptation and murder, of exile and loss.
Once expelled from the Garden, Eve and Adam have to find their way past recriminations and bitterness to construct a new life together in a harsh land. But the challenges are many for the world's first family. Among their children are Cain and Abel, and soon the adults must discover how to be parents to one son who is everything they could hope for and another who is sullen, difficult, and rife with insecurities and jealousies. In the background, always, is the incomprehensibility of God's motives as He watches over their faltering attempts to build a life. In Fallen, David Maine has drawn a convincing, wryly observant, and enthralling portrait of a family---one driven (and riven) by passions, jealousies, irrationality, and love. The result is an intimate, in-depth story of brothers, a husband, and a wife---people whose struggles are both completely familiar and yet utterly original.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Maine tackles biblical narrative once again in his inventive second novel (after 2004's The Preservationist, which starred Noah and his large brood), a spirited retelling of the creation yarn and the conflict between Cain and Abel. The novel opens with Cain as a "jumpy, scared old man," marked for life and wandering the desert in exile for killing Abel. Flashing back years, Maine fills in the story: Cain's "smoldering challenge" to Adam's authority; his scorn for Abel's innocence; his lust and greed and anger. (Eve was convinced that Cain, in utero, killed a twin brother.) Maine's equally compelling retelling of the creation myth explores, among other things, the dynamic between the world's first husband and wife as it evolved, bumpily and confusingly, after they were banished from the Garden of Eden. What makes this intelligent, funny, meaty and moving novel so fascinating is the ease with which Maine inserts a modern sensibility and keen psychological analysis even as he jumps back and forth between the timelines of the two narratives and remains faithful to their biblical roots.
