This is the sequel to Genesis. You may have seen some of it on the Discovery Channel.
God has been away somewhere for a bit and turns up again in this story. It’s a lot more straightforward than the first book. It’s the story of how God and two brothers, Moses and Aaron, take over a group called the Israelites.
God bullies Moses into getting the Israelites to rob the Egyptians, gives him a magic wand and teaches him some simple conjuring tricks to fool them with, then, out of nowhere, God tries to kill Moses. Later, God makes the Egyptian king refuse to let the Israelites leave, and then, because the king does exactly what God wants, God kills a lot of children, prisoners and slaves. God reminds me a bit of Begbie from Trainspotting. It is even funny on occasions: ‘I’m not easily angered’ says God at one point, making me laugh out loud.
The book I’ve got has a map in it and Moses seems to go in completely the wrong direction to where he wants to end up, just so he can visit a mountain.
It then starts to get quite clever, suggesting that maybe God is actually Moses or made up by him, for instance no one apart from Moses ever sees God.
There seems to be a bit of a power struggle between Moses and Aaron, (possibly over an extortion racket) which Moses wins, before they get their family to kill a lot of their old friends to prove a point. Moses makes up a lot of rules, destroys them in a fit of anger, then makes up some more before splattering an altar and those left with buckets of blood. Bits like that make the book quite horrifyingly compelling but the end of the book is a bit dull, as it is just the rules and a long description of how to put up a big tent, twice.