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

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

Pulitzer Prize finalist Lydia Millet’s sublime 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781324005032
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	05/12/2020
Pages:	240
Sales rank:	1,111,919
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.60(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Lydia Millet is the author of A Children’s Bible, shortlisted for the National Book Award and a New York Times Top 10 book of 2020. Her many other works of fiction have won awards from PEN Center USA and the American Academy of Arts and Letters; the story collection Love in Infant Monkeys was a Pulitzer Prize finalist. She holds a master’s degree in environmental economics and works at the Center for Biological Diversity.

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

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

Wall Street Journal Magazine

"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

"[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

"Blazingly witty."

Entertainment Weekly

"[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."

Ron Charles

"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

"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

"[D]arkly funny and painfully sharp."

Los Angeles Times - Carolyn Kellogg

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

2020-02-09
A group of children are forced to fend for themselves in the face of rising sea levels, worsening storms, and willfully ignorant parents.

This somber novel by Millet (Fight No More, 2018, etc.) is a Lord of the Flies–style tale with a climate-fiction twist. Evie, the narrator, is one of a group of kids and teenagers spending a summer with their parents at a lakeside rental mansion that’s pitched as a vacation retreat but increasingly feels like a bulwark against increasingly intense weather on the coasts. The parents’ chief activity involves stockpiling alcohol, leaving their children to explore the area. When a massive storm hits, the parents double down on self-medicating (“during the night the older generation had dosed itself with Ecstasy”) while the kids explore further, ultimately arriving at a farm that’s well stocked, at least for a while. The novel takes some time to find its footing, introducing a host of characters who are initially difficult to differentiate, but it ultimately settles on Evie and her rising fury at the grown-ups’ incapacity to rise to a challenge and her younger brother, Jack, who’s become increasingly obsessed with a Bible he’s received and whether it can serve as a climate change survival handbook. (At one point he attempts to gather up animals, Noah-like.) Millet’s allegorical messages are simple: The next generation will have to clean up (or endure) the climate mess prior ones created, and any notion that we can simply spend our way to higher ground is a delusion. Millet presses that last point in the novel’s latter pages as the brief peace of the farm is disrupted in often horrific fashion. In the process, Jack’s Bible plays an allegorical role too: Can we maintain civilization as we know it when the world descends into Old Testament–style chaos?

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

Kirkus Reviews

Xe Sands offers an excellent performance of this timely and thought-provoking audiobook. A commentary on climate change, this novel blends a view of contemporary life with a warning about a bleak future. Sands voices Evie, a teenage narrator whose dim view of adults is well justified. With her peers, she must take charge when a summer stay at a coastal mansion becomes a battle for survival. Sands balances an authentic adolescent attitude with a thoughtful, responsible tone that reflects the side of Evie that is beyond her years. Her Evie is a coolheaded figure who inspires listeners to wonder about Millet's message. The dialogue is realistic, and Sands's pacing is superb. Millet offers much to consider in this unique novel, and Sands brings the story to life without excess drama or sentimentality. L.B.F. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2020, Portland, Maine

NOVEMBER 2020 - AudioFile