They know what they are.” And Gaiman’s anatomy of America puts this un-anchored itinerant search for belief at its heart. No one ever needs to go searching for the heart of Norway, or looks for the soul of Mozambique. “This is the only country in the world,” Wednesday tells Shadow, “that worries about what it is. What has all this to do with Trump? Well, American Gods is much more about America than it is about gods. “One day every soldier in the empire has to shower in the blood of your sacrificial bull,” Gaiman’s Jacquel, his version of Anubis, notes sardonically: “The next day they don’t even remember your birthday.” If gods are artefacts of human belief, that leaves them at the mercy of human caprice. You don’t worship Zeus, after all, and you’ve never even heard of Tarhunz – though in their day they commanded human devotion on a vast scale. One of Gaiman’s nicer ironies is the way the main thing we associate with gods – immortality – is at odds with how temporary specific religions have proved in human history. And then they will not take responsibility for their beliefs.”

People believe in these things, and that makes them powerful. We learn that mortal America coexists with whole populations of deities, some brought over by settlers from the old world – Odin, Thor, Loki, Anansi and so on – and some newly minted out of the particularities of modern life: television, the internet, the stock market, the shadowy power of what nowadays we would call “the deep state”: gods with names such as Media, The Technical Boy and The Intangibles. He runs into, and ends up working for, the enigmatic Mr Wednesday: one of the novel’s titular gods, whose identity will not, if you know the etymology of that particular day of the week, come as a surprise. Shadow Moon, the book’s improbably named hero, is released from jail to attend his wife’s funeral.

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