A Children's Bible: A Novel (Paperback)
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Staff Reviews
Millet gathers a large group of old friends and their children for an extended summer vacation in a ginormous rented house. The children, largely teens, are more or less forgotten by their drunken, self-absorbed parents. The kids, embarrassed - even horrified - by their parents’ behaviors, actively disown them and take charge of their own vacation. A gigantic, climate-change-driven storm takes them all by surprise, causes significant destruction, and widens the wedge between adults and kids. Without giving away more of the story, Millet suggests the younger generation has the drive, but perhaps not all the tools, to save themselves, and even their disdained parents. Millet has penned a thoughtful, appropriately angsty, and definitely possible tale set in the not-very-distant future.
— Kay WosewickMay 2020 Indie Next List
“In A Children’s Bible, the age-old war between kids and their parents, children and adults, is reimagined through the lens of Biblical devastation. The result is harrowing and, in unexpected moments, hilarious. Millet has created a story that feels both folkloric and brand new, a tale as much about environmental cataclysm as it is about fighting for the people, things, and ideas that remain right and true, no matter how high the water gets. I love Millet’s perfectly tuned sentences as much as the ambition of this novel, which I’ll continue thinking about for a long time.”
— Kristen Iskandrian, Thank You Books, Birmingham, AL
Description
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.
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 has a master’s degree in environmental economics and lives in Tucson, Arizona, and Camden, Maine.
Praise For…
This superb novel begins as a generational comedy…and turns steadily darker…[I]n this time of great upheaval, [Lydia Millet] implies, our foundational myths take on new meaning and hope.
— New York Times Book Review, Editors’ Choice
With this slim yet potent book, [Millet] shows it is even possible to coax pleasure and beauty from the uncomfortable work of highlighting unfortunate truths.
— Emily Bobrow - Wall Street Journal
[A] story that explores how alarming and baffling it feels to endure the destruction of one’s world.
— Ron Charles - Washington Post
[A] prime example of that rare and precious thing: a funny dystopia.
— Molly Young - New York
A dystopian novel of great power.
— Adam Begley - Sunday Times
Darkly funny and painfully sharp.
— Carolyn Kellogg - Los Angeles Times
[Lydia] Millet mordantly captures the complacency of older generations in the face of apocalypse, and the righteous anger, endurance, and practicality of the young.
— The New Yorker
With brilliant restraint, Millet conceives her own low-key ‘bible.’…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.
— Jonathan Dee - New York Times Book Review
Lydia Millet has given us a compellingly written, compact, slyly funny novel that warns of the catastrophic events that may overwhelm us. Unless.
— Jeffrey Ann Goudie - Boston Globe
A Children’s Bible is a…book that’s easy to enter fully (and not quite as easy to exit; you might have bad dreams)…Millet’s writing is spare but textured. There’s genuine feeling here, and humor, too…I loved the imagination of this book, the way it gracefully—as the title implies—tackles the divine.
— Rumaan Alam - New Republic
Millet's take on eco-catastrophe is slyly off-kilter in this novel about kids left to fend for themselves as society unravels.
— Elizabeth Kolbert - The Week