Lydia Millet Books in Order

Teenager Estée Kraft grows up in a surreal California home ruled by her cruel, insect-obsessed father. Escaping childhood does not end the damage, as marriage and motherhood reveal how deeply violence and appetite can shape a life.

Rosemary, an ex-con with few prospects, becomes wildly infatuated with former president George H. W. Bush. Her pursuit moves from fan letters to public campaigns, becoming a sharply comic and increasingly outrageous quest for connection.

Locked in a room at an abandoned psychiatric hospital, a nameless woman writes her memories on the walls. Her life has held abandonment and exploitation, yet her voice remains remarkably open to kindness, beauty, and human connection.

Over three chaotic days, alcoholic freeloader Dean Decetes schemes to become famous with help from an ex-con sidekick. Around him, his long-suffering sister and her coworkers pursue their own messy hopes for love, escape, and revenge.

The physicists Oppenheimer, Fermi, and Szilard suddenly appear in 2003, displaced from the moment the first atomic bomb test begins. A Santa Fe librarian and her husband take them in, joining a chaotic attempt to confront nuclear history.

T., an ambitious Los Angeles real estate developer, sees money and success as life’s organizing principles. Family upheaval and grief send him into an unexpected obsession with endangered animals, changing how he sees his work and himself.

In these inventive stories, famous figures encounter animals in ways that expose vanity, cruelty, longing, and remorse. Madonna, Noam Chomsky, Sharon Stone, and Thomas Edison are among the people recast in darkly comic imagined episodes.

Hal, an IRS bureaucrat troubled by his family life, sets out for Central America to find his wife’s vanished young employer. His impulsive mission turns into a disorienting journey through danger, desire, and increasingly strange terrain.

When Cara Sykes’s mother disappears from Cape Cod, strange animals and a watery specter point Cara, Max, and gifted young Jax toward a hidden world. Their search leads beneath the sea and into an escalating environmental battle.

After her husband’s death, Susan Lindley inherits a vast Pasadena mansion filled with taxidermy. As she restores the animals and fends off opportunistic relatives, a peculiar household forms around her, offering grief, chaos, and unexpected possibility.

With their mother still missing, Cara and Jax Sykes are pulled back into the hidden conflict threatening their Cape Cod home. Supernatural forces are working to intensify global warming, and the siblings must find a way to fight back.

This standalone story follows George Adamson, known for his life among lions in the Kenyan bush. His care for two sibling lions, Girl and Boy, becomes a moving and uneasy meditation on devotion, freedom, and the limits of human control.

On their Caribbean honeymoon, Deb and Chip meet a marine biologist who has found real mermaids in a coral reef. When a resort company tries to exploit the discovery, the newlyweds join an unlikely effort to protect the creatures.

In a climate-ravaged future, seventeen-year-old Nat travels to Hawaii for her parents’ company-managed Final Week. As her hacker brother uncovers troubling truths about the corporations running society, Nat must decide where her loyalty belongs.

Anna flees Alaska with her six-year-old daughter to escape Ned, her cold and unfaithful husband. Hiding at a rundown Maine motel offers little safety when Ned’s pursuit turns criminal and reality itself begins to feel unstable.

Cara and her brothers hope their mother’s return will bring a normal summer to Cape Cod. Instead, old secrets, dangerous creatures, and a looming climate catastrophe force the Sykes family into the final fight of their hidden war.

A lonely Los Angeles real estate broker sits at the center of linked stories about fractured families and uneasy communities. Moving through wealthy homes, the collection finds cruelty, need, tenderness, and absurdity in people trying to belong.

A group of teenagers are dragged to a lakeside vacation where their parents drink, party, and neglect them. After a devastating storm, Eve and the other children must navigate a dangerous world that suddenly resembles biblical catastrophe.

After a failed love affair, Gil walks from New York to Arizona and settles beside a family in a glass-walled house. His growing bond with the neighbors slowly opens a quiet new chapter in his life.

In this nonfiction anti-memoir, Millet joins scenes from childhood, parenthood, work, and friendship with close attention to animals and plants. It considers the joy of life on Earth alongside the grief of watching that richness disappear.

These linked stories follow families, couples, and loners in post-pandemic Los Angeles as they collide over desire, class, guilt, and social anxiety. Millet’s characters make messy mistakes while trying to live with private longing and public crisis.

Two Brooklyn women in their forties struggle after the sudden, baffling death of their friend Claire. Told in two linked parts, the novel follows Mara and Jen as grief, old secrets, family ties, and new relationships reshape their friendship.