What if God fell in love and the person was already married? A bitter story of the very first love triangle between a man, his wife, and their God First came Adam, whose fall soured His quest for absolute authority, then Noah, whose dreary sense of duty He found dull. God resolves for a third and final time to get it right, to select a vessel through whom He can direct human affairs, and to whom He can communicate directly His will. He chooses a solitary figure whose trust must be wooed, but whose faith, once secured, will surely reflect even greater glory and love. Were matters only that simple. In Only Human , Jenny Diski's brilliant and affecting retelling of the Abraham and Sarah story, God learns that no man, chosen or not, is solitary, and that the bonds forged by the human heart are resilient even to divine commandment. Diski transforms an archetypal tale of Old Testament obedience into a fierce love triangle, a test of wills over not only mankind's future, but over who will tell the story of its past.

Marie de Gournay was eighteen when she read, and was overwhelmed by, the essays of the French philosopher Montaigne. She had to be revived with hellebore. When she finally met Montaigne, she stabbed herself with a hairpin until the blood ran in order to show her devotion. He made her his adopted daughter for the two months they knew each other. He died four years later, after which, though scorned by intellectuals, she became his editor. Jenny Diski engages with this passionate and confused relationship between 'father and daughter', old writer/young acolyte, possible lovers, using both their voices. Much of their story is about absence of the people they love. In Jenny Diski's hands it becomes a fascinating tale.

Continuing her narration of the story of the Patriarchs in the Book of Genesis, After These Things recounts the relationship between Abraham’s tragic son Isaac and Isaac’s son Jacob. In following the psychological trail of the children of Abraham, the first properly constituted family, we discover all the complexities of love, power, and desire that make them so quintessentially human. Jenny Diski is the author of eight novels and two memoirs: Skating to Antarctica and Stranger on a Train.