The First Men

The gods made the first man to be a tool. One of them, in secret, made him something more, and could never take it back.

At the dawn of the world, the gods grow tired of their own labor and decide to make a worker. From river clay and the blood of a god they have put to death, Enki, lord of the sweet waters and of wisdom, shapes the first of humankind.

But Enki does a forbidden thing. Into the clay he folds a secret spark of himself: thought, will, the hunger to make and to ask. And his creatures wake far further than they were ever meant to.

Adamu is the first. He learns to name the world, and by naming it he makes it his. He takes a wife, Hawwa, brighter and wilder than even her maker intended, who will not stop reaching for what lies past the edge of the given world. He gives a name to the first friend he ever loves, and then he buries him, and feels the first grief any made thing has ever felt. And when his own long life begins at last to fail, Adamu asks the oldest question there is, the one his maker has spent a lifetime refusing to answer: when we die, where do we go?

Drawn from the clay tablets of ancient Sumer and the first chapters of Genesis, The First Men retells humankind's oldest story, the making, the garden, the first death, as one continuous and intimate human drama. It is a novel about the morning consciousness first opened its eyes, about the love and the grief and the defiance that came with it, and about a maker who gave his children everything but the one mercy they needed most.

Book One of The Anunnaki Chronicles.