Lost Lambs: A Novel

National bestseller. A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice. Named a Most Anticipated Book of 2026 by Vulture, Bustle, Good Housekeeping, Playboy, The Times (UK), Our Culture, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, and Harper’s Bazaar. A Book Club Pick from Belletrist, Bustle, and Good Housekeeping.

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

“With her energetic prose and restless imagination, Cash does one better than survey the world; she reinvents it.” ―Hannah Gold, The New Yorker

“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 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.