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.The author of the New York Times Notable Book Ghost Lights and eight other works of fiction, Lydia Millet has won the PEN-USA Award and been a Pulitzer Prize finalist. She lives in Tucson, Arizona.“[A]n extraordinary metaphysical thriller from one of America’s most inventive novelists… This is the skeleton―and no small amount of the flesh―of a Stephen King novel...But Millet’s fiction inhabits a different moral universe from King’s. In his novels, the nature of evil goes largely unquestioned; what concerns King is the task of summoning the courage to confront it. Sweet Lamb of Heaven uses the same epic devices to put forth a new idea of horror...Millet gives us a new paradigm; her adversary isn’t horror’s usual bad guy, an atavistic entity hell-bent on destruction for its own sake, but the modern world’s infatuation with manufactured, convenient sameness. The showdown still comes decked out in all the suspenseful trappings we love best―a plot filled with surveillance and intrigue; a terrifyingly malevolent antagonist; an endangered child; a ragtag crew of brave resistors―but the soul of humanity is only one modest portion of what’s at stake." (Laura Miller, Slate Book Review)