""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.

Antonine Maillet, a native of Bouctouche, New Brunswick, has spent her life conjuring the impossible into being. She is the author of wry and wildly inventive adult fiction, children's books, radio and television scripts, and more than a dozen plays.

Maillet's sparkling imagination, versatility, and commitment to giving Acadian culture a voice have been recognized at home and abroad. She was the first non-citizen of France to win the prestigious Prix Goncourt, which she received for Pélagie-la-Charette. Her now classic monologue La Sagouine won the Chalmers Canadian Play Award; Don l'Orignal won the Governor General's Award for Fiction; and On the Eighth Day, Wayne Grady's rollicking translation of Le Huitième Jour, won the Governor General's Award for Translation.