Lost Lambs - by Madeline Cash (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER. Finalist for the 2026 Barnes & Noble Discover Prize. A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice. Dua Lipa's Service95 Book Club Pick for August 2026.

"Extremely smart, impossibly funny, and just plain fun to read--this book hums with a brilliant, lunatic energy all its own. I finished it in a day." --Caro Claire Burke, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Yesteryear

"If the Royal Tenenbaums were middle-class and likable, they'd be this madcap family." --The New York Times Book Review

"Madeline Cash is a voice like no other." --Lena Dunham, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Famesick

"Funny, fast and intoxicating. Believe the hype." --Dua Lipa

"I loved it. I raced through it. It's just fantastic writing." --Sarah Jessica Parker

Rippling with humor, warmth, and style, Lost Lambs is a new vision of the charms and pitfalls of family dysfunction.

The Flynn family is coming undone. Catherine and Bud's open marriage has reached its breaking point as their daughters spiral in their own chaotic orbits: Abigail, the eldest, is dating a man in his twenties nicknamed War Crimes Wes; Louise, the middle child, maintains a secret correspondence with an online terrorist; the brilliant youngest, Harper, is being sent to wilderness reform camp due to her insistence that someone--or something--is monitoring the town's citizens.

Casting a shadow across their lives, and their small coastal town, is Paul Alabaster, a billionaire shipping magnate. Rumors of corruption circulate, but no one dares dig too deep. No one except Harper, whose obsession with a mysterious shipping container exposes a criminal conspiracy that unwittingly endangers her family--a crisis that just may bring them closer together.

Irreverent and addictive, pinging between the voices of the Flynns and the characters around them, Madeline Cash's Lost Lambs is a debut novel of quick-witted observation and surprising tenderness. In it, Cash has crafted a family saga for the twenty-first century, all held together with crazy glue.

Review Quotes

"Delightfully cracked . . . A winning mixture of black comedy and innocent sweetness."
--Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal

"Cash paints the alternate world of Lost Lambs in vivid, breezy prose alight with casual wit . . . A gutsy, big-hearted romp that's unusual even for a first-time novelist . . . With her energetic prose and restless imagination, Cash does one better than survey the world; she reinvents it."
--Hannah Gold, The New Yorker

"The comic novel we need right now . . . Cash's tone . . . hums a melody of deep-seated compassion and straight-faced absurdity . . . It's a tableau of family affection that cedes none of her characters' adorable freakishness and reminds us how good it feels to be found."
--Ron Charles, The Washington Post

"Madcap . . . A story that is part quirky crime caper, part manic cultural satire and part affectionate dramedy of family both biological and found."
--John Maher, The New York Times

"Riotously assured . . . [Cash] brings to mind writers as disparate as Lydia Millet, Thomas Pynchon, and Jonathan Franzen . . . With her debut novel, Cash has announced herself as a writer with a distinctive voice, an eye for the grotesque within the mundane, and a deep skepticism of the stories that behemoth institutions tell to justify themselves."
--Rhoda Feng, The Boston Globe

"Lost Lambs is an incredibly tender--yet also hilarious--debut. Madeline Cash explores adolescence, faith, family, and power through the lens of a tightly controlled religious community, where devotion and vulnerability exist side by side. With wildly inventive writing, Lost Lambs captures moral uncertainty and emotional awakening with remarkable precision. This novel marks the emergence of an incredible new talent in Madeline Cash."
--Isaac Fitzgerald, the Today show

"Cash's virtuosic wit allows her to warm hearts at the same time as satirizing the world . . . In an age when the conspiracy theorists do indeed turn out to be disturbingly right as well as disturbingly wrong, and when old-fashioned tenderness and laughter are ever more required, Cash is a happy and energizing new voice."
--Lara Feigel, The Guardian

"Energetic, hilarious, and spirited, this debut novel from the co-founder of Forever Magazine was already the talk of the town last summer and fall. Like Franzen before her, Cash illuminates the inner workings of a modern family . . . Lost Lambs takes a thrillingly big swing and delivers a page-turner as full of snark as it is anchored in affection."
--Jasmine Vojdani, Vulture

"A beautifully calibrated high-wire act, a big-hearted family drama with a mystery plot nestled within . . . Enchanting, poignant, and often very funny, the product of a strikingly original new voice in American fiction."
--Marc Weingarten, Los Angeles Times

"A swirling mix of coming of age, family drama, and intriguing thriller, Lost Lambs tells the story of the Flynn family and the universe of relationships that orbits it. All of the members of the family--Bud, Catherine, and their three daughters--are personalities worthy of their own book, but Cash deftly weaves their story into one rollicking, clever, and heartrending read."
--Harper's Bazaar

"Cash has managed to cram all the goof and melodrama of an action film/coming-of-age high-school romcom into crisp, polished prose . . . It's as if a Virago novel of the 1960s or '70s--sharp, characterful, gorgeously written--were laced with the pills, vape juice and shadowy plutocracies of twenty-first-century America . . . You finish the book with the kind of smile on your face that contemporary fiction rarely leaves you with. Lost Lambs is a perky, fiendishly readable debut. Cash's career is surely blossoming before her."
--Magnus Rena, Financial Times

"Refreshing [and] confident . . . In [Madeline Cash's] hands, cultivating counter-ideologies is a way for the vulnerable to hone their intuition, to trust themselves . . . Like a good conspiracy theory, [Lost Lambs] offers something to think about and more than a few laughs besides."
--Niela Orr, Vulture

"Decades after the turn-of-the-century heyday of hysterical realism, Cash may be pioneering a new mode for this moment: Call it optimism-pilled manic-pixie-paranoid-realism spiced with the sacred . . . Both hyper-contemporary and nostalgic, almost like a traditional family novel written by someone steeped in the narrative structure of multi-player video games."
--Emmeline Clein, Cultured

"A twenty-first-century family saga with comic timing and the moral unease of a crime story. Its humor is quick and irreverent, often veering into slapstick, yet it never loses sight of the tenderness that binds its characters together."
--Hannah Tishkoff, Los Angeles Review of Books

"This sparkling debut is a true tour de force: unexpected, entertaining and genuinely funny . . . The most wildly original book of the year."
--Marie-Claire Chappet, Harper's Bazaar (UK)

"Within her intelligent, funny writing, Cash manages to capture something we can all universally relate to: how normal it is to have a dysfunctional family."
--Roisin Kelly, The Times (UK)

"Cash is a confident and commanding stylist with an eye for oddball characters and fast-paced, screwball comedy of the Nell Zink variety, the vim of her wit and wordplay striking a sneakily discordant note with the more expected drone of suburban malaise . . . It takes skill to write with such an easy lightness of touch. Her coup is that she pulls off this slapdash irreverence."
--Lucy Scholes, New Statesman

"It's most noticeably an absurdist comedy built around a twisting, capering narrative, but Lost Lambs is by turns also tender, insightful and even existential."
--GQ (UK)

"Cash's wonderful debut walks a vertiginous path between conventional family dramedy and high-concept conspiracy caper . . . A technicolour reinvention of the classic American family novel."
--Claire Allfree, Daily Mail (UK)

"A clever portrait of the modern American family overflowing with charm, wit, and style . . . The big heart of this book is as spirited, and tender as, well, a little lost lamb. I could live in Cash's mind, but I'll settle for a few days in her smart new novel."
--Sophia June, Playboy

"A refreshingly original take on the family drama . . . The mix of drama, humour and an undercurrent of mystery make this a compelling read."
--Good Housekeeping (UK)

"Every book content creator I follow is either raving about their advance copy of this book or frothing at the mouth for one; a comedic family epic, Lost Lambs is one already one of the most talked about works of literary fiction for us weird girls."
--Caroline Reilly, Forbes

"A bustling family novel that simmers with the same tensions and resentments found in the works of Jonathan Franzen, Jeffrey Eugenides, and the great family novelists before her."
--Samantha Leach, Bustle

"Like a quirked-up Jonathan Franzen or Paul Murray . . . The plot itself is surprising and wild, but you'll stay for the extremely specific people that make up this family and town. I was laughing immediately, couldn't help turning the page over and over again: I didn't want to be apart from these funny little weirdos even for a minute."
--Julia Hass, Literary Hub

"Lost Lambs is technically ambitious and linguistically playful, but, most strikingly of all, it is a twenty-first-century novel that is ultimately optimistic. Cash's characters navigate one another and the novel's satirical late capitalist world, and are ultimately rewarded with what feels like Cash's oddest move of all: a genuinely happy ending that feels true."
--Marina Scholtz, AnOther Magazine

"I devoured the mischievous characters . . . Their stories layer and weave into each other, which requires you, as a reader, to stay sort of glued to each page. I've been seeing the labels 'downtown' and 'internet-era' thrown around in conversations about Lost Lambs, but I didn't clock that while reading it last summer. Sure, there are some online conspiracy wormholes and Bryan Johnson-like blood experiments, but I couldn't imagine a modern American classic without those."
--Emily Sundberg, Interview Magazine

"As a reader who describes their favorite genre as 'dysfunctional family dramas, ' it is a unique experience to encounter one that is utterly original. And yet, Madeline Cash's debut manages to be just that."
--Sarah Gelman, Amazon Best Books of January

"Every page of Cash's debut novel is utterly absorbing, and her authorial voice is sure to win hearts and laughs. I know I'll read whatever wry delight she pens next."
--Hudson Warm, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

"This book captures the voice of [Cash's] generation."
--Adam Vitcavage, Debutiful

"[A] glittering debut . . . Cash has a finely tuned ear for the silliness of modern language . . . and she serves up wild slapstick and a twist of nasty horror before sending things out on a sweet and surprisingly sentimental note. The novel is anchored in its affection for the hapless but well-meaning Flynns, whose banter is endlessly irresistible . . . It's unforgettable."
--Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"Cash has a hit debut on her hands based on the guffaw-inducing, deadpan humor alone . . . In addition to the generous portions of humor, Cash weaves in a fun romp in which the family members get to exercise their strengths. An entertaining and breezy read reminiscent of the best of Kevin Wilson."
--Booklist (starred review)

"[Lost Lambs is] a clever, irreverent family drama that, for all its bite, also hits some sincere notes . . . While her peers' work may be politically relevant, irreverent, highbrow, or entertaining, Cash takes things one step further: Lost Lambs has all those qualities, and also a heart."
--Bookpage

"Cash's debut novel has fun with everything it touches, rocketing through the points of view of the family members and other townspeople, delighting in wordplay and absurd details . . . Between the crowd of quirky characters and drastic situations, the high-flying sentences and prose style, and Cash's relentless joke-cracking, the novel is, like Harper, almost too clever for its own good--but the Flynns stay just real enough to win our hearts."
--Kirkus Reviews

"Extremely smart, impossibly funny, and just plain fun to read--this book hums with a brilliant, lunatic energy all its own. I finished it in a day."
--Caro Claire Burke, author of Yesteryear

"Like an epic road trip or a perfect dinner party, Lost Lambs is immersive and propulsive and I never wanted it to end. I can't remember the last time a novel made me laugh so hard or feel so much tenderness for its characters, this feral chorus of voices and desires, unhinged and witty and full of longing; I wanted to take care of them, hear their whispered confessions, stay up all night talking with them in the treehouse. Madeline Cash's prose is tuned to a singular radio channel no one else has ever found, where the music is part torch song, part power ballad, part heartbeat heard from the womb--strange and sweet and utterly surprising. I loved it. I devoured it. I can't wait for everyone else to hear it, too."
--Leslie Jamison, author of Splinters

"A wonderful new comic voice. I've read entire books that contain less wit and inventiveness than a single one of Madeline Cash's sentences, which make 'lifelike' and 'absurd' seem like synonyms. Her ear for dialogue is inspired. Lost Lambs had me laughing throughout--even when I was horrified--and rooting for the Flynn sisters to save us all."
--Eric Puchner, New York Times bestselling author of Dream State

"With a big surge of energy, Lost Lambs splits the nucleus of the American family--look into the flash and you'll see teen terrorists, smoking hot handywomen, and the most suicidal suburban dad this side of John Cheever. Madeline Cash likes to get dark, but fortunately the dark is where her writing glows."
--Tony Tulathimutte, author of Rejection

"From magical realism to magical nihilism, Madeline Cash is a voice like no other. Her novel of normal people breaking down under the most abnormal circumstances will shift the way you see the family and community into something operatic, strange, and profound."
--Lena Dunham

"Lost Lambs is meticulously crafted by a writer who is clearly a dazzling and singular new voice in literary fiction, as bold and assured a debut as Zadie Smith's White Teeth or Jeffrey Eugenides' The Virgin Suicides. Loud, hilarious, shocking, and sensitive, Lost Lambs is the beginning of a long and thrilling career."
--Megan Nolan, author of Ordinary Human Failings

"Lost Lambs is wild. It struts. Madeline Cash calls us into a vividly imagined world, a Pynchon paradise absurd enough to actually create a great, great American novel."
--Samantha Hunt, author of The Unwritten Book

"Lost Lambs goes off like a firework. Intrigue and mystery burst outward while the family at the center of the story implodes. What I loved most were the big, seeking hearts of Madeline Cash's characters as they reach awkwardly for love and connection. This novel is as sincere as it is funny (and it's very funny)."
--Ramona Ausubel, bestselling author of The Last Animal

"The nightmare of the now has a radiant and vicious new bard, and her name is Madeline Cash."
--Sam Lipsyte, author of No One Left to Come Looking for You

About the Author