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.

“Over twelve novels and two collections, Lydia Millet has emerged as a major American novelist, writing vividly about the ties between people and other animals and the crisis of extinction. Her exquisite new novel, the first since A Children’s Bible, tells the story of an Arizona man’s relationship with the family next door, whose house has one wall made entirely out of glass. The story delivers attraction and love, friendship and grief. But Millet also evokes the uncanny. Through close observation of human and animal life in the desert, she captures the daunting scale of human society without losing sight of the real difference one person can make in the world. Written with humor and benevolence, Dinosaurs asks big questions: Can a person be good? Can a man be good? Compellingly told, emotionally moving, and intellectually rich, Dinosaurs may be Millet’s finest novel yet.”

In Los Angeles, Dean Decetes, a pornographer with messianic delusions, spins out of control, spending his time drinking himself into a stupor, getting beaten up by strangers he’s recklessly insulted, stealing credit cards to pay for sex, being arrested, begging favors, and mounting a PR campaign to make himself famous with the help of a loyal foot soldier–a porn-loving midget he met in jail. Meanwhile his pious, romantic spinster sister, who reluctantly keeps house for him, busies herself writing quasi-religious love notes to the boss she worships, and two of her coworkers at the statistics company–an obsessive-compulsive Christian Scientist in a twisted marriage and a promiscuous, depressed blonde bombshell–become enmeshed in her life as she dreams of ridding herself of her freeloading brother and being carried away on a white horse by her employer. Then a teenage math genius runs away from home after her mother humiliates her in school and hooks up at a bar with Decetes’s suicidal editor. Told from five points of view, this novel takes place over the three wild days in which these lives intersect.

In her first story collection since Love in Infant Monkeys, which became a Pulitzer Prize finalist, Lydia Millet explores what it means to be home. Nina, a lonely real-estate broker estranged from her only relative, is at the center of a web of stories connecting fractured communities and families. She moves through the houses of L.A.’s wealthy elite and finds men and women both crass and tender, vicious and desperate. With wit and intellect, Millet offers profound insight into human behavior from the ordinary to the bizarre: strong-minded girls are beset by the helpless; myopic executives are tormented by their employees; and beastly men do beastly things. Fresh off the critical triumph of Sweet Lamb of Heaven (longlisted for the National Book Award), Millet is pioneering a new kind of satire-compassionate toward its victims and hilariously brutal in its depiction of modern American life.

As a wealthy, young real-estate developer in Los Angeles, T. lives an isolated life. He has always kept his distance from people–from his doting mother to his crass fraternity brothers–but remains unaware of his loneliness until one night, while driving to Las Vegas, he hits a coyote on the highway. The experience unnerves him and inspires a transformation that leads him to question his business pursuits for the first time in his life, to take a chance at falling in love, and to begin breaking into zoos across the country, where he finds solace in the presence of animals on the brink of extinction. A beautiful, heart-wrenching tale, How the Dead Dream is also a riveting commentary on individualism and community in the modern social landscape and how the lives of people and animals are deeply entwined. Judged by many–including the Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post Book World–to be Lydia Millet’s best work to date, it is, as Time Out New York perfectly states, This beautiful writer’s most ambitious novel yet, a captivating balancing act between full-bodied satire and bighearted insight.

Lions, Komodo dragons, dogs, monkeys, and pheasants?all have shared spotlights and tabloid headlines with celebrities such as Sharon Stone, Thomas Edison, and David Hasselhoff. In this critically acclaimed collection, Lydia Millet hilariously tweaks these unholy communions to run a stake through the heart of our fascination with famous people and pop culture in wildly inventive stories that “evoke the spectrum of human feeling and also its limits” (Publishers Weekly, starred review). While in so much fiction animals exist as symbols of good and evil or as author stand-ins, they represent nothing but themselves in Millet’s ruthlessly lucid prose. Implacable in their actions, the animals in Millet’s spiraling fictional riffs and flounces show up their humans as bloated with foolishness yet curiously vulnerable, as in a tour-de-force, Kabbalah-infused interior monologue by Madonna after she shoots a pheasant on her Scottish estate. Millet treads newly imaginative territory with these charismatic tales.

This stunning novel introduces Susan Lindley, a woman adrift after her husband’s death. Suddenly gifted her great uncle’s Pasadena mansion, Susan decides to restore his extensive collection of preserved animals, tending to ‘the fur and feathers, the beaks, the bones and shimmering tails.’ Meanwhile, a menagerie of uniquely damaged humans – including a cheating husband and a chorus of eccentric elderly women – joins her in residence. Funny and heartbreaking, Magnificence is the story of a woman emerging from the sudden dissolution of her family. Millet’s trademark themes – evolution and extinction, children and parenthood, loss and wonder – produce a rapturous final act to the critically acclaimed cycle of novels that began with How the Dead Dream.

In this hilarious novel from Pulitzer Prize finalist Lydia Millet, a honeymooning couple makes friends with a marine biologist who discovers genuine mermaids in a coral reef-and who, the next night, apparently drowns in her hotel bathtub. As a resort chain swoops in to corner the market on mermaids, the newlyweds (opinionated, skeptical narrator Deb and handsome online gamer Chip, the world’s friendliest man) join forces with other vacationers-including an ex-Navy SEAL with a love of explosives and a hipster Tokyo VJ-to protect the mermaids from the corporate ‘Venture of Marvels’ that wants to turn their habitat into a theme park.

At the opening of My Happy Life, the unnamed narrator of this bittersweet fictional memoir has been abandoned in a locked room of a defunct hospital for the mentally ill. She hasn’t seen the nice man who brings her food in days; she’s eaten the soap and the toothpaste; she tried to eat the plaster on her walls, a dietary adventure that ended none too well. And yet, curiously, the narrator is happy. Despite a lifetime of neglect, physical abuse, and loss, she’s incapable of perceiving slight or injury. She has infinite faith in the goodwill of others, loves even her enemies, and finds grace and communion in places most people wouldn’t dare to look. By stepping outside her meager circumstances, she’s able to live each moment as though it were her last–with gratitude, longing, and delight. Lauded by both critics and listeners, My Happy Life consistently surprises and excites with its original vision of a unique woman whose rich interior life protects her from the horrors of external reality.

The three dead geniuses who invented the atomic bomb– Robert Oppenheimer, Leo Szilard, and Enrico Fermi–mysteriously appear in Sante Fe, New Mexico, in 2003, nearly sixty years after they watched history’s first mushroom cloud rise over the New Mexico desert. One by one, they are discovered by a shy librarian, who takes them in and devotes herself to them. Faced with the evidence of their nuclear legacy, the scientists embark on a global disarmament campaign that takes them from Hiroshima to Nevada to the United Nations. Along the way, they acquire a billionaire pothead benefactor and a growing convoy of RVs carrying groupies, drifters, activists, former Deadheads, New Age freeloaders, and religious fanatics. In this heroically mischievous, sweeping tour de force, Lydia Millet brings us an apocalyptic fable that marries the personal to the political, confronts the longing for immortality with the desire for redemption, and evokes both the beauty and tragedy of the nuclear sublime.

Publisher Marketing: “Fascinating and thought provoking! “Pills and Starships” is a chilling look at an ecologically damaged future where big business and the government have not only seized control of the surviving population through drugs, but have taken charge of death itself. Lydia Millet has raised questions that will resonate with readers for years to come.” –Joelle Charbonneau, author of “The Testing” “One of the most acclaimed novelists of her generation.” –“Los Angeles Times” In this richly imagined dystopic future brought by global warming, mass human migrations are constant, water and food are scarce, new babies are illegal, and the disintegrating society is run by corporates who feed the people a steady diet of “pharma” to keep them happy. Usually, seventeen-year-old Nat doesn’t let it get her down too much: this, after all, is the life she’s used to; and though she is nostalgic for the ancient world she’s heard about, she’s also realistic, cheerful, and tough. But now her family–her parents and her hacker brother Sam–have come by ship to the Big Island of Hawaii for their parents’ Final Week. The few Americans who still live well also live long–so long that older adults bow out not by natural means but by buying death contracts. Nat’s family is spending their pharma-guided last week at a luxury resort complex called the Twilight Island Acropolis, where their parents have bought a “vacation contract.” Counting down the days till her parents are scheduled to die, Nat keeps a record of everything her family does in the company-supplied diary that came in the hotel’s care package. When Sam rebels against the corporates his parents have hired to handle their last days, Nat has to choose a side. Does she let her parents go gently into that good night, or does she turn against the system and try to break them out? This page-turning first YA novel by critically acclaimed author Lydia Millet is stylish and dark and yet deeply hopeful, bringing Millet’s characteristic humor and style to a new generation of young readers. Biographical Note: Lydia Millet is the author of seven novels for adults as well as a story collection called “Love in Infant Monkeys” (2009), which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Her first book for middle-grade readers, “The Fires Beneath the Sea,” was one of “Kirkus”‘ Best Children’s Books of 2011, as well as a Junior Library Guild selection. Millet works as an editor and writer at a nonprofit in Tucson, Arizona, where she lives with her two young children.

From the Lydia Millet’s chilling new novel is the first-person account of a young mother, Anna, escaping 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. 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. This double-edged and satisfying story features 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.