By novel's end…the stakes have been raised through the roof. Laura Lippman - New York Times Book ReviewĮ have a real thriller on our hands…part of a higher-stakes game being played by Millet, one that will ultimately, unabashedly touch on time, beauty, horror, God, demons and the very nature of being. Sweet Lamb of Heaven confounded me, delightfully so…I have little patience with literary novels that claim to have the propulsive momentum of a thriller, yet Millet pulls it off…It is Anna's voice-cool, intelligent, passionate, contradictory-that makes this novel so affecting…ow I missed it when it was gone, how I yearned for it to speak to me again. 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.Ī 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.

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. 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. 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. Caliban,” you will detect some of her fabulist stylings here, too, coupled with the sense that the perplexing things that happen to Anna may be externalizations of her own chaotic life.Longlisted for the National Book Award for Fiction

If you’ve ever read Rachel Ingalls, the extraordinary author of “Mrs. One minute it’s “The Good Wife” the next it’s “Lost” or Stephen King and there is always a tinge of Jean Paul Sartre afoot.

As the story unfolds in Anna’s no-nonsense voice, it passes through a number of categories, honoring yet defying each.

The best genre designation for “Sweet Lamb of Heaven” might be metaphysical thriller. It’s a rare thing, a semi-experimental narrative, and, thanks to Millet’s precisely elliptical language, it’s a rare pleasure to read. It’s nothing like them at all and nothing like most literary novels. Yes, Lydia Millet’s new novel is, as the jacket promises, “the story of Anna, the mother of a young child, fleeing a manipulative and unfaithful husband.”īut no, the haunting “Sweet Lamb of Heaven” is nothing like the marital-discord novels that might arrive bearing somewhat similar descriptions - a twisty thriller such as “Gone Girl,” say, or a fraught romance by Luanne Rice.

Sweet lamb of heaven a novel