Eden Revisited (A Novel)

Eden Revisited is Hungarian writer Laszlo Bito’s vivid reimagining of the saga of the Bible’s first family: Adam and Eve and their sons Cain and Abel. This novel immerses readers in a mythic landscape: the Garden of Eden with its “tree of bitter apples,” the forbidden fruit that Bito conceives as having hallucinogenic properties; the Outerworld—a wilderness of cliffs, caves, and forests cut off from the wider world by impassable swamps and the Euphrates River, teeming with crocodiles. Further East, beyond the Outerworld, is the peaceful, matriarchal Land of Nod, where, roughly fifteen years before the novel begins, a terrible crime had been committed and a mystery born. Sacrilegious, erotic, and inventive, Eden Revisited removes an omnipotent Creator from our origin story and challenges our notions of divinity and innocence. After reading Bito’s novel, readers will never see Adam and Eve, the Garden of Eden, the Fall and the immortal question “Am I my brother’s keeper?” in quite the same way.