• Skip to main content
  • Skip to secondary navigation
  • Skip to footer

LYDIA MILLET

The Official Website of Lydia Millet

  • All Books
  • Contact
    • Lydia
    • Literary Agent
    • Publicity Agent
    • Event Manager
  • Events
  • Etc.
    • Selected Book Reviews by Lydia
    • Selected Interviews
    • Opinion
      • Oprah Daily
      • The New Republic
      • New York Times
      • Literary Hub
      • Daily Beast
      • Largehearted Boy

A Children’s Bible

A Children’s Bible
  • Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
  • Available in: Hardcover, eBook, Audio Book, Paperback
  • Published: May 12, 2020
Purchase

 

A 2020 National Book Awards finalist

from the book jacket…

A novel of teenage alienation and adult complacency in an unraveling world.

Pulitzer Prize finalist Lydia Millet’s new novel — her first since the National Book Award long-listed Sweet Lamb of Heaven — follows a group of twelve eerily mature children on a forced vacation with their families at a sprawling lakeside mansion.

Contemptuous of their parents, who pass their days in a stupor of liquor, drugs, and sex, the children feel neglected and suffocated at the same time. When a destructive storm descends on the summer estate, the group’s ringleaders — including Eve, who narrates the story — decide to run away, leading the younger ones on a dangerous foray into the apocalyptic chaos outside.

As the scenes of devastation begin to mimic events in the dog-eared picture Bible carried around by her beloved little brother, Eve devotes herself to keeping him safe from harm.

A Children’s Bible is a prophetic, heartbreaking story of generational divide — and a haunting vision of what awaits us on the far side of Revelation.

Praise

“… she shows it is even possible to coax pleasure and beauty from the uncomfortable work of highlighting unfortunate truths.”

– The Wall Street Journal (paywall)

“… a blistering little classic: “Lord of the Flies” for a generation of young people left to fend for themselves on their parents’ rapidly warming planet.”

– Ron Charles, The Washington Post

“This superb novel begins as a generational comedy … and turns steadily darker, as climate collapse and societal breakdown encroach. But Millet’s light touch never falters; in this time of great upheaval, she implies, our foundational myths take on new meaning and hope.”

– Editors’ Choice, New York Times Book Review (paywall)

“[D]arkly funny and painfully sharp.”

– Carolyn Kellogg, Los Angeles Times (paywall)

“To call it a generational allegory seems like an understatement. Millet is one of the most fascinating novelists working.”

– Wall Street Journal Magazine

“As bewitching, unflinching, wry, and profoundly attuned to the state of the planet as ever, supremely gifted Millet tells a commanding and wrenching tale of cataclysmic change and what it will take to survive.”

– Donna Seaman, Booklist (paywall)

“[A] tense, prophetic … [and] gripping page-turner.”

– Donna Bettencourt, Library Journal (starred review)

“If you think it’s hard to find original voices in contemporary fiction, you’re not really reading properly―Millet is one such voice: comic, erudite, humane.”

– Jonny Diamond, LitHub

“A bleak and righteously angry tale determined to challenge our rationalizations about climate change.”

– Mark Athitakis, Kirkus Reviews

“A Children’s Bible is a beautiful, brutal novel that calls all of us to account.”

– Michael Schaub, Alta

“It is wildly funny, deeply scary and unnervingly familiar”

– Adam Begley, The London Sunday Times (paywall)

Book Review Links

An Epic Storm Turns a Summer Holiday Into Potent Allegory

– Jonathan Dee for The New York Times (paywall)

A Children’s Bible and 9 Other Reads I Can’t Get Out of My Head

– Molly Young for New York

After the flood, now what?: Lydia Millet’s ‘A Children’s Bible’ is a parable of childhood and the environment

– Jeffrey Ann Goudie for Boston Globe

The Reunion Apocalypse: A New Novel from Lydia Millet

– David L. Ulin for 4Columns

Review: ‘A Children’s Bible,’ by Lydia Millet

– StarTribune (paywall)

 


Tagged with: fiction, novel

Footer

SOCIAL MANIA

  • Facebook
  • Instagram

RECENT NEWS

Elegy for an Altered Planet

Opinion for the NYT

 

The One Beautiful Word the World Almost Ruined

Essay in OprahDaily.com

 

New York Times Magazine profile

NYT Magazine


Book Links

  • A Children’s Bible
  • Dinosaurs
  • Everyone’s Pretty
  • Fight No More
  • George Bush: Dark Prince of Love
  • Ghost Lights
  • How the Dead Dream
  • Love in Infant Monkeys
  • Magnificence
  • Mermaids in Paradise
  • My Happy Life
  • Oh Pure and Radiant Heart
  • Omnivores
  • Pills and Starships
  • Sweet Lamb of Heaven

Plumb the Depths

Read our privacy policy.

© 2023 Lydia Millet · Log in