“I can’t remember the last time a novel made me laugh so hard or feel so much tenderness for its characters . . . Madeline Cash’s prose is tuned to a singular radio channel no one else has ever found”—Leslie Jamison, author of Splinters

“With a big surge of energy, Lost Lambs splits the nucleus of the American family . . . Madeline Cash likes to get dark, but fortunately the dark is where her writing glows.”—Tony Tulathimutte, author of Rejection

“Madeline Cash is a voice like no other.”—Lena Dunham

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 Crime 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 sends the family hurtling into a criminal conspiracy—one that may just bring them closer together.

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