Sweet Lamb of Heaven: A Novel

Lydia Millet

Mey 2016 · W. W. Norton & Company

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Longlisted for the National Book Award for Fiction: Blending domestic thriller and psychological horror, this compelling page-turner follows a mother fleeing her estranged husband. Lydia Millet’s previous work has been shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Likewise greeted with rapturous praise, Sweet Lamb of Heaven is a first-person account of a young mother, Anna, fleeing her cold and unfaithful husband, a businessman who’s just launched his first campaign for political office. When Ned chases Anna and their six-year-old daughter from Alaska to Maine, the two go into hiding in a run-down motel on the coast. But the longer they stay, the less the guests in the dingy motel look like typical tourists—and the less Ned resembles a typical candidate. As his pursuit of Anna and their child moves from threatening to criminal, Ned begins to alter his wife’s world in ways she never could have imagined. 

A double-edged and satisfying story with a strong female protagonist, a thrilling plot, and a creeping sense of the apocalyptic, Sweet Lamb of Heaven builds to a shattering ending with profound implications for its characters—and for all of us.

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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.