That Richard Dawkins' THE GOD DELUSION is a huge success in Britain - 92,000 copies sold there to date - isn't that much of a surprise, as his editor, Bantam Press Publishing Director Sally Gaminara, told Publishing News: "He's always been an atheist, but this is the first time he's pulled all the elements together. I knew it had the potential to do well because of the climate we were publishing into, but it has exceeded all our hopes. I knew what we had when he delivered it - no one has been this bold before. I knew that we wanted to market it as a Germaine Greer-style polemic, but for atheism rather than feminism."

And so, when a polemic does well, out come the parodies. In February, SPCK will publish THE DAWKINS DELUSION, written by Alister McGrath, Professor of Historical Theology at Oxford University, and his wife Joanna, a lecturer in the psychology of religion at the University of London. It will ape Bantam's typography on its jacket and the publisher is naturally hoping that it will benefit from the surprising success of Dawkins' book. "I wanted to write my book after reading Dawkins' own because I thought that unless somebody said something back people would assume that there was no case to be made," McGrath, who's already tackled Dawkins' scientific ideas in a previous book, DAWKINS' GOD, told PN. "I think Dawkins' book is very badly written and hugely selective. It is extremely inaccurate and aggressive. I hope that my book will help get a proper debate going." Well, we'll see about that...