Lamb

A Time's best sci-fi book of the year 2023A visceral story of collective memory and moss-coated horror, Lamb asks us how far we'd go to protect those we love, and how intensely we are bound to those who have come before us.

''It''s inside every parent to want to carry their child''s terror. It''s the thing they never tell you about. Watching your child grow up, watching your child learn to suffer...'' When lorry driver Dougie Alport carries out a deadly attack on his employer''s head office, the reverberations of his actions unleash a grief in his wife Maureen that threatens to reveal the secret she has spent years hiding from their son, Boyd. Moving north to start again is Maureen''s best response. But as the walls begin to throb with mould and his mother slips from his grasp, Boyd decides to flee, finding solace with a new friend at the landfill site on the edge of town. Here, a startling discovery upends Boyd''s new life and forces him into a reckoning with his mother, her past, and his future. A visceral story of collective memory and moss-coated horror, Lamb asks us how far we''d go to protect those we love, and how intensely we are bound to those who have come before us.