The original is here:
Thought-provoking, humorous, compelling, highly recommended
The protagonist of Howard McEwan’s novel God Forsaken is on the roll of a lifetime, riding high on a wave of near psychopathic ambition to achieve one career goal after another, from Ivy League degrees, tenure, cushy teaching posts, to a series of eyebrow-raising bestsellers in his chosen field of Religious Studies, each more provocative and popular than the next, lifting him ever closer to the sun,
the one and only Dr. Desmond DeFoss, PhD, atheist public intellectual, media darling, well on his way to becoming an enduring cultural icon until fate steps in, his wave crashing against the rocky shore of outrageous sexual scandal. turning fame and fortune on their heads in its wake, for future infamy and poverty, shunning and shame, exile to a backwater Catholic university in Kentucky, to do the Devil’s bidding—literally, to ghostwrite and market Satan’s autobiography.
Yes, you read that right—spoiler alert!—Satan, one of many delightful WTF moments along this merry way, one stop after another on a subway ride through Dr. DeFoss’s personal Purgatory, increasingly curious as to what you will face on the streets above: a mother’s secret journal, a grandfather’s Pentecostal megachurch, a co-narrator, Gibby, betrayed former girlfriend and editor, devout bibliophile, hoping to shed her skin of gross materialism in search of some deeper purpose, Mary Chase, yet another co-ed temptress, Monica Kwalick, demure, unsung literary genius, Abaddon, The Angel Of Death (for Christ’s sake), Father Buckner, a violent, vengeful Catholic priest, and of course Satan himself, never far from the action at hand, offering glimpse after glimpse, as fantastic as it might sound, of the beginning and end of our world.