Lost Lambs

By Madeline Cash

Book Overview

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. Longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize.

"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

"Laugh-out-loud funny and unexpectedly moving. Lost Lambs is both a blistering satire of our present moment and a compassionate portrait of a family trying to stay human in Musk's America." --Paul Murray, bestselling author of The Bee Sting

"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 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.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1250468531
• ISBN13: 9781250468536
• Release Date: January 2027
• Publisher: Picador USA
• Length: 336 Pages
• Weight: 1.00 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 5.4" x 8.3"

Customer Reviews

Quirky, suspensful and humourous. I highly recommend this for your 2026 reading list.

What a debut!!! I wasn't going to read Lost Lambs because I didn't think it would be my type of read. I can't believe I almost skipped it and am so glad I gave it a chance! "Lost Lambs" was a quirky, suspenseful, and humorous slice-of-life story. There are little details scattered throughout the book (like the intentional, repetitive misspelling of words or the way a character circles back to a random thought or observation) that tickled my brain in a unique way. I love how my perception of the characters changed so drastically throughout the book. I also loved how the book was written from so many characters' points of view, yet it didn't feel confusing or forced. It's absolutely brilliant. I loved it from beginning to end. I would highly recommend this one to any adult reader.