Craig Raine's dazzlingly original second novel, The Divine Comedy is a gripping meditation on sex and death and God and the myriad ways in which the human body plays dirty tricks on us.

Craig Raine was born in 1944 and educated at Exeter College, Oxford. He became editor of Quarto in 1979 and was subsequently Poetry Editor at Faber from 1981 to 1991. He is now an emeritus Fellow at New College, Oxford, and has been the editor of Aret¿the arts tri-quarterly, since 1999. He is the author of six works of poetry, and his Collected Poems 1978-1999 were published in 2000. His verse drama, '1953' was directed by Patrick Marber at the Almeida Theatre in 1996. He is the author of two collections of literary essays and, most recently, a critical study T. S. Eliot (2007). The Divine Comedy is his second novel.