Disguised as a young Dinka woman, God came at dusk to a refugee camp in the North Dafur region of Sudan. He wore a flimsy cotton dress, battered leather sandals, hoop earrings, and a length of black-and-white beads around his neck.'

So begins Ron Currie Jnr's blasphemous and heretical debut novel.

God -- or Sora, as she's called -- has come to earth to experience its conflicts first hand, but of course, adopting a human form also means assuming human frailty and mortality, and when God is killed in action, so to speak, the nations of the world are stripped of all they once thought certain, everything they once held dear. Waves of panic, civil unrest and mass suicide sweep the globe -- but those who have survived the initial shock are subsequently even more shocked to find that life goes on. Somehow. And then, of course, they are faced with the dilema of how -- precisely -- to carry on living this new, God-less life of theirs; the question of who (or what) to believe in now God is dead.

Like the holy grail of fiction, God is Dead is a debut novel that is truly -- and terrifyingly -- original. Both fantastic (in all senses of the word) and hypnotic, it promises to be the book of 2007 and beyond.