""On the seventh day, God rested."

He'd had a busy week, forming the earth and everything in it and creating Adam and Eve. But, after all, a week is only a week." In On the Eighth Day, Antonine Maillet imagines a wider, more exuberant world created on "the day when everything is dared and anything is possible."

She spins a tale of two brothers -- a giant carved from an oak tree and a scamp shaped out of bread dough -- who set off to find their true inheritance. The story of their travels is a fantastic picaresque -- a cheerful Gulliver's Travels, a comic Pilgrim's Progress, an Acadian Wizard of Oz.