Sins of the Bees: A Novel

by Annie Lampman

Overview

LitHub/CrimeReads best new debut selection

Popsugar Book Club best new thrillers selection

Winner of the 2020 American Fiction Award for Thriller: Crime from American Book Fest

Sins of the Bees blends natural majesty, mystery, and compelling characterizations to present the lives of two very different women and their tumultuous interactions with a dangerous doomsday cult.

Other than her bonsai trees, twenty-year-old arborist Silvania August Moonbeam Merigal is alone in the world. After first her mother dies and then her grandfather—the man who raised her and the last of her family—Silva suffers a sexual assault and becomes pregnant. Then, ready to end her own life, she discovers evidence of a long-lost artist grandmother, Isabelle.

Desperate to remake a family for herself, Silva leaves her island home on the Puget Sound and traces her grandmother’s path to first a hippie beekeeper named Nick Larkins with secrets of his own, and then to a religious, anti-government, Y2K cult embedded deep in the wilds of Hells Canyon. Len Dietz is the charismatic leader of the Almost Paradise compound, a place full of violence and drama: impregnated child brides called the Twelve Maidens, an armed occupation of a visitor’s center, shot-up mountain sheep washing up along with a half-drowned dog, and men transporting weapons in the middle of the night.

As tensions erupt into violence, Silva, Isabelle, Nick, and the members of Almost Paradise find themselves disastrously entangled, and Silva is forced to face both her own history of loss, and the history of loss she’s stepped into: ruinous stories of family that threaten to destroy them all.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781643135335
Publisher:	Pegasus Books
Publication date:	09/01/2020
Pages:	352
Sales rank:	1,073,015
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.40(d)

About the Author

Annie Lampman has a Master of Fine Arts in fiction and is a professor of honors creative writing at the Washington State University Honors College. She has been awarded a 2020 Literature Fellowship Special Mention by the Idaho Commission on the Arts, a Best American Essays “Notable,” a Pushcart Prize Special Mention, the Dogwood Literary Award in Fiction, the Everybody Writes Award in Poetry, and a Bureau of Land Management national wilderness artist’s residency in the Owyhee Canyonlands Wilderness. She lives in Moscow, Idaho, and for decades has backpacked into the depths of Hells Canyon.

Editorial Reviews

07/13/2020

When Silva Merigal, the 20-year-old heroine of Lampman’s affecting, lyrical debut, is going through her late grandfather Eamon’s effects on Washington State’s Trawler Island, she discovers paintings of 12 pregnant teenage girls in an envelope postmarked Two Rivers, Idaho. A handwritten note suggests that the paintings were sent to Eamon for safekeeping by Eamon’s runaway wife, Isabelle, the artist grandmother Silva has never met. Silva decides to drive to Two Rivers, where she hopes to find Isabelle, but instead encounters apocalyptic cult leader Len Dietz, who’s collecting munitions for the end times while grooming child brides to birth his holy army. The texts of Isabelle’s unsent letters to Eamon, filled with wistful love for him and grief over the fates of the girls she has been commissioned to paint by the female cult member who managed the brides’ training, punctuate the twinned stories of Silva’s search and her relationship with beekeeper Nick Larkin, an enemy of Len’s, whose property near the cult’s compound she winds up helping Nick look after. Though grounded in a mystery, the novel blossoms when it explores how the rhythms of nature add grace to human solitude. Only an incongruously happy ending mars this profound, stark tale of loss and longing across generations. Lampman is a writer to watch. Agent: Mark Gottlieb, Trident Media. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly

With exquisite prose, Lampman’s Sins of the Bees weaves the brutality and beauty of nature, the depths of loss and the grief of love, and the twisted beliefs of a religious cult into an edge of your seat literary thriller.

Kim Taylor Blakemore

Compelling and deeply affecting, Sins of the Bees is a literary thriller about two women’s search for identity and their struggle to feel grounded and loved; to belong. I felt submerged in the lyrical writing, swept away by the undertows of desire, desperation, loss, and redemption. Annie Lampman’s debut is a stunner.

Lesley Kagen

Grief in the green bounty, passion in the deep desert, the regrets of our ancestors coursing in our veins—Sins of the Bees is about the ways we in the American West try and fail, and yet might keep trying, to be in more sustaining relationship with ourselves, one another, and all the land that holds us. The writing here is breathtaking, as is the vision. This is a striking debut.

Joe Wilkins

Sins of the Bees is a fascinating glimpse into the world of a paranoid doomsday cult, with echoes of The Handmaid's Tale—though this isn't science fiction. This heartfelt contemporary literary thriller brings together multiple timelines into a compelling whole, with elements of romance, suspense, and mystery intertwining. Annie Lampman is clearly a writer to watch.

Dan Chaon

Gorgeous and thought-provoking descriptions of bee and tree life, as well as the Pacific Northwest generally. Suggest some nature-focused nonfiction, such as Peter Wohlleben’s Can You Hear the Trees Talking, to go with Lampman’s debut novel.

Booklist

Sins of the Bees is a breathtaking, multi-layered meditation on love and loss, family and faith. With an urgency befitting our times, Lampman exposes the devastating price we pay when we empower cunning, amoral leaders. An ambitious debut that pits the family we're born into against the one we choose for ourselves.

Marco Rafalà

Sins of the Bees echoes the work of writers like Annie Proulx and Rick Bass in its portrayal of memory-haunted folks inextricably bound to the harsh and beautiful land.

Daniel Orozco

More than a human melodrama, Lampman uses everything she knows from backpacking into the land around Idaho’s Snake River and Hell’s Canyon to add realism to her tale of love and loss. In fact, this is both a naturalist’s guide to the sunbaked sections of the Pacific northwest—the plants and animals that live there (including bees and bonsai trees)—and a literary thriller of a romance that keeps the reader hanging on to the epilogue. Brava, Ms. Lampman!

Mitch Silver

"Lampman’s prose has a haunting, poetic quality and a deep engagement with the natural world."

CrimeReads ("5 Debut Novels You Should Read in September")

A wild ride that includes a bounty of secrets, a doomsday cult, and enough twists to satisfy even the most seasoned mystery reader.

PopSugar ("Best New Thriller and Mystery Books in September")

Sins of the Bees is a complex and beautifully written family saga about loss, tragedy, and redemption set against the unsettling confines of a cult in rural Idaho. Silva and Isabelle are unforgettable protagonists questing for meaning, belonging, and family. Annie Lampman’s gorgeous, astonishing debut kept me up way too late at night!

Mary Pauline Lowry

Lush and sweeping in its language and its landscape, Sins of the Bees takes us to the heart of human need—for love, for family, for a reason to stay alive. Moving between the verdant Pacific Coast and the arid breaks of Hells Canyon, from the artist's reflective sensibility to the survivalist's absolute desire to own and control the people around him, Lampman weaves a story of destiny and desperation that pitches one woman's quest for paradise against the violent will of a man bent on domination and destruction.

Kim Barnes

With stunning, poetic language, Lampman weaves a remarkable novel full of wisdom and hope. It’s a contemporary cautionary tale that speaks to the dangers and devastation wrought by powerful, charismatic men—and to the women who resurrect themselves by rejecting and repudiating them. And at the story’s core is a deep search for family connection. A marvelous, metaphorical and profound debut.

Buddy Levy

Sins of the Bees is a breathtaking, multi-layered meditation on love and loss, family and faith. With an urgency befitting our times, Lampman exposes the devastating price we pay when we empower cunning, amoral leaders. An ambitious debut that pits the family we're born into against the one we choose for ourselves.

Marco Rafalà

A wild ride that includes a bounty of secrets, a doomsday cult, and enough twists to satisfy even the most seasoned mystery reader.

PopSugar