The Best Novels of 2020 The Telegraph
The Best Books of 2020 The Evening Standard
100 Best Holiday Reads The Sunday Times
 
A brilliant, indelible novel of teenage alienation and adult complacency in a world whose climate and culture are unravelling.
 
Pulitzer Prize finalist Lydia Millet's sublime new novel - her first since the National Book Award longlisted Sweet Lamb of Heaven - follows a group of eerily mature children on a forced vacation with their parents at a lakeside mansion. Contemptuous of their elders, who pass their days in a hedonistic stupor, the children are driven out into a chaotic landscape after a great storm descends. The story's narrator, Eve, devotes herself to the safety of her beloved little brother as events around them begin to mimic scenes from his cherished picture Bible.
 
Millet, praised as "unnervingly talented" (San Francisco Chronicle), has produced a heartbreaking story of the legacy of climate change denial. Her parable of the coming generational divide offers a lucid vision of what awaits us on the other side of Revelation.