A Children's Bible

by Lydia Millet

Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

An allegorical tale that confronts the follies of willfully ignoring climate change, A Children's Bible can still be both moving and touching. Lydia Millet, a prolific writer who has a master's degree in environmental policy, paints a portrait of kids ultimately being the hope for our future.

Finalist for the 2020 National Book Award for Fiction
One of the New York Times' Ten Best Books of the Year
Named one of the best novels of the year by Time, Washington Post, NPR, Chicago Tribune, Esquire, BBC, and many others
National Bestseller

"A blistering little classic." —Ron Charles, Washington Post

A Children’s Bible follows a group of twelve eerily mature children on a forced vacation with their families at a sprawling lakeside mansion. Contemptuous of their parents, the children decide to run away when a destructive storm descends on the summer estate, embarking on a dangerous foray into the apocalyptic chaos outside. Lydia Millet’s prophetic and heartbreaking story of generational divide offers a haunting vision of what awaits us on the far side of Revelation.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781324005049
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	05/12/2020
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	240
Sales rank:	264,805
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Lydia Millet is the author of A Children's Bible, a finalist for the National Book Award and a New York Times Top 10 book of 2020, among other works of fiction. She has won awards from PEN Center USA and the American Academy of Arts and Letters and been shortlisted for the National Book Award, National Book Critics Circle Award, and Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Her story collection Love in Infant Monkeys was a Pulitzer Prize finalist. She lives in Tucson, Arizona.

Editorial Reviews

To Jack, the Bible is an old book found in a decaying summer house, an artifact to try to make sense of, a missive from some lost world. With brilliant restraint, Millet conceives her own low-key "bible" the same way. It's not a history, not a tract or a jeremiad; the truth it bears is not going to overwrite the future. It's a tale in which whoever or whatever comes after us might recognize, however imperfectly, a certain continuity: an exotic but still decodable shred of evidence from the lost world that is the world we are living in right now.

The New York Times Book Review - Jonathan Dee

01/20/2020

Millet follows up Sweet Lamb of Heaven with a lean, ironic allegory of climate change and biblical comeuppance. A group of friends, successful “artsy and educated types,” plan an “offensively long reunion” at a summer house “built by robber barons in the 19th century,” somewhere on the East Coast. They bring along their children, ranging in age from prepubescent to 17, who devise inventive ways to ignore them. With the young teenage narrator, Evie, Millet perfectly captures the blend of indifference and scorn with which the teenagers view their boozy parents, emblematic of humanity’s dithering in the face of environmental catastrophe: “They didn’t do well with long-term warnings. Even medium-term.” After a massive storm interrupts the summer idyll and brings looting and riots to New York and Boston, the parents lose themselves to booze and cocaine and the children flee with a menagerie of rescued animals, seeking refuge at a farmhouse. This lurid section, in which they are besieged by armed raiders searching for food, is shaky, and allusions to biblical tales such as Noah’s Ark and the Ten Commandments feel facile, but the novel regains its footing once parents and children reunite, with the children calling the shots. Millet’s look at intergenerational strife falls short of her best work. (May)

Publishers Weekly

"An American chaos story about a climate-changed future…A Children’s Bible gains strength from its contradictions. It is hilarious yet tender; absurd yet chillingly realistic, nostalgic yet prescient."

Electric Lit - Halimah Marcus

"[C]ompellingly written, compact [and] slyly funny."

Boston Globe - Jeffrey Ann Goldie

"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."

Booklist - Donna Seaman

"Millet mordantly captures the complacency of older generations in the face of apocalypse, and the righteous anger, endurance, and practicality of the young."

New Yorker

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

Wall Street Journal Magazine

"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."

New York Times Book Review

"[A] blistering little classic…Millet’s wit and her penchant for strange twists produce the kind of climate fiction we need: a novel that moves beyond the realm of reporting and editorial, a story that explores how alarming and baffling it feels to endure the destruction of one’s world. Take this book, eat it up."

Washington Post - Ron Charles

"[D]arkly funny and painfully sharp."

Los Angeles Times - Carolyn Kellogg

"Blazingly witty."

Entertainment Weekly

"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."

Literary Hub - Jonny Diamond

12/01/2019

Millet's first novel since the National Book Award long-listed Sweet Lamb of Heaven demonstrates her penchant for insightfully off-kilter scenarios as a group of preternaturally grown-up children make do while grudgingly vacationing with their heedless parents at a lakeside mansion. When a violent storm descends, the children are driven from the estate, and narrator Eve seeks to protect her little brother as the landscape increasingly recalls scenes from his beloved picture Bible.

Library Journal