"This is a story about some things that happened to me about twelve thousand years ago."


With these words, the narrator begins her account of events set at the crucial point in human evolution, when hunter-gathering began to be abandoned as way of life just as the first signs of organized religion emerged. Who or what the narrator is, and how she can speak to us today of events in our distant past, become clear as she describes her existence amongst the sophisticated people of the Mesolithic era - people identical to ourselves but with very different views of the world and humanity's place in it - and how they came to adopt a strategy for survival that would change both forever.


Noema is a story about ingenuity in adversity, the subjectivity of consciousness and the sense of self. It is also about perception: of life and death, of time, of the nature of reality, and ultimately of a God for whom love and worship may not be enough.