Inventing God

Hafiz is a twenty-five year old Muslim doing post-graduate work in genetics at the University of Beirut. He is one of a team working on the possibility of fashioning a biological weapon that would be effective against some ethnic groups and not others. This project seems to him impossible, but still highly dangerous. Lisa is a sixteen year old Israeli girl who feels threatened by the Jewish insistence on dwelling on memories of the Holocaust. She looks for a way out to a future. Maurice Rotblatt is a middle-aged ex-television-guru who comes to the Middle East and calls for a plague on all ethnic and religious belligerents. He then disappears. His friends in England wonder - is he a victim? A trickster? Or has he left hints about some hope for a future? The story ends in September 2001. It is by the ability to look at the interweaving actions and aspirations of many different characters - in Lebanon, Israel, Turkey, England - that there might be a chance, it is suggested, for humans to be nudged out of their self-destructive genetic and environmental conditioning. Inventing God is a fascinating and highly topical new novel from a previous winner of the Whitbread Book of the Year award.