Best Books of Spring 2026
On a cool fall night in 1999, twenty-six-year-old Sarah Green crept out of her house, retrieved a backpack from its hiding place, and ran for her life. She was escaping not just the Aggressive Christianity Missions Training Corps, a paramilitary religious cult in the New Mexico desert, but also the cruelty of the cult’s leader — her mother, Deborah.
In THE ORACLE’S DAUGHTER, Harrison Hill tells the shocking true story of ACMTC, from its beginnings in the counterculture to the explosive trial that would lead to its downfall. As gripping as it is deeply researched, THE ORACLE’S DAUGHTER also investigates cults and fringe religions across American history — and shows how much more vulnerable we are to extremism than we might like to think.
Photo by Sebastian Kim.
Harrison Hill grew up in Charlottesville, Virginia and lives in Brooklyn, New York. He received his MFA in nonfiction from Columbia University, where he also taught undergraduate writing. His journalism and essays have appeared in The Cut, GQ, Vogue, Travel + Leisure, AFAR, The Guardian, and The Threepenny Review. The Oracle’s Daughter is his first book.