A Children's Bible

Lydia Millet

Paperback

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Do you recommend this book?

Yes!

Reader Score

80%

80% of readers

recommend this book

Critic Reviews

Great

Based on 12 reviews on

Shortlist:National Book Award -Fiction (2020)

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.

Book Details

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Publish Date: Feb 16th, 2021
Pages: 240
Language: English
Edition: undefined - undefined
Dimensions: 8.20in - 5.40in - 0.70in - 0.44lb
EAN: 9780393867381
Categories: • Literary• Disaster• Family Life - Siblings

About the Author

Millet, Lydia: - Lydia Millet is the author of A Children's Bible, a finalist for the National Book Award and a New York Times Top Ten book of the Year. Her 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.

Critics’ reviews

Praise for this book

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"