The Book of Genesis, with its quick creation story and hasty exit from Eden, leaves a lot to the imagination, which may explain why so many artists have been inspired to add some emotional muscle to the Bible's bare-bones beginnings.

Minnesota writer Elissa Elliott is the latest to fill in the missing pieces on the fall of man in her affecting debut, "Eve: A Novel of the First Woman," in which she conjures all the dysfunction and dissent a reader would hope to find from the family that also invented fratricide.

In Elliott's imagined history, the children of Adam and Eve learn they are not alone in the world, discovering a civilization of city dwellers whose idol worship and worldly ways further drive a wedge between brothers Cain and Abel, and the three sisters who, with their mother, take turns telling their tale. The oldest girl is Naava, a Euphrates Lolita naively batting her kohl-rimmed eyes at her brothers and a strange prince whose arrival starts her family's unraveling. The middle girl is Aya, the club-footed cook whose healing powers can't fix what's wrong. The youngest is Dara, sent as an offering to the city people, whose simple observations about the customs of this puzzling new culture offer some of the novel's most transporting moments.

Their mother is a complicated woman -- doubtful of her Creator's love, despairing at having lost the paradise she once shared alone with Adam, dissatisfied with his efforts to re-create it -- and Elliott is at her most effective when she brings Eve's high-relief choices of good vs. evil down to human scale. "Why would Elohim have given me these desires, unless they are good desires?" she asks Adam, before eating that fateful fruit. Yet in her efforts to put flesh and blood on a woman who is, for most of us, a biblical cartoon character, Elliott sometimes shares a little too much information. For instance, when Elohim drops by the garden to chat with the foggy, postcoital couple, Eve explains, "Adam and I nodded sleepily, for we had greatly exerted ourselves in our Being One."

Like "The Red Tent" and others in the biblical fiction genre, there's an intriguing feminist spin to the questions Eve raises about woman's hand in the fall. Though the seams of the author's historical research sometimes show through the writing (downloadable reading group guide available!), Elliott's imaginative and convincing portrait of Eve ought to give book clubs plenty to talk about, and will leave Bible study groups even more to argue over.

Laura Billings is a freelance writer in St. Paul.