Synopsis

The Devil is grumpy: he has only managed to invent a few little devilish things like wasps and thistles and hail, whereas God has created Earth in seven days … and of course Man. The Devil is green with envy!

But the Devil’s Granny is a little more switched on than her Grandson. ”Make them unhappy”, she whispers in his ear. ”Make them lonely, even if they are surrounded by other people”, she suggests – and it works wonders, people get lonely and in their loneliness they don’t manage to see the opportunities in front them.

The Devil wants to do more damage, but his mind is blank. Again, his Granny has a bright idea. ”How about making them talk badly about one another?”, she suggests. And then the Devil invents slander. And again, it works wonders: people are whispering, spreading lies and no one knows who to trust.

Now the Devil is getting warm: together with his Granny, he invents wrath, greed, laziness and all sorts of other bad inventions until Mankind is in a terrible state of array.

God, who is exhausted after having created Earth and Man in such a short time and has been asleep ever since, is woken up by the Archangel and alerted to the fact that things are going badly on Earth. ”How about you invent something that will make the bad thoughts go away?”, he suggests to God. ”A feeling that would make Man warm inside and give them back the sparkle in life”. ”How about if Man could find peace just by sitting together with other people, sharing a meal and talking, hearing about each other’s lives and being happy on other’s behalf”. ”And what if Man could have such an urge to be with another person that they would throw all they had in their hands to spend their life with this person, sleep with this person and even have a child together”. God likes it and he invents love.

The book ends: ”And this is how love came into this world. All the other stuff was still around, all the stuff that the Devil and his Granny invented (and it is still around today). There is wrath. Slander. Loneliness. Hatred. Greed. The works, and there is lots of it. But greatest of all is love, because love conquers all.”

With illustrations by Cato Thau-Jensen