Our Take

Madeline Cash arrives with a debut that announces a genuinely distinctive voice: sharp, absurdist, alive with comic timing, and sneakily more emotionally invested in its characters than it initially lets on. The Flynn family is a gift — each member broken in a highly specific, highly entertaining way — and Cash rotates between their perspectives and those of the panoramic cast around them with impressive control for a first novel. The conspiracy plot that kicks in with Harper's shipping container obsession gives Lost Lambs its propulsive energy, but the real pleasure is the texture of the family dynamics underneath it: the open marriage that has quietly become a closed wound, the very different ways three daughters have processed the same chaotic childhood, the billionaire whose menace is rendered in the comic register without losing its genuine edge. Cash has an excellent instinct for when to be funny and when to let the warmth through. Readers who loved Rachel Cusk's satirical edge without the coolness, or who responded to the anarchic family comedies of Sam Lipsyte or the debut fizz of Ottessa Moshfegh's early work, will find a lot to love here. A sharp, funny, surprisingly tender novel — and a debut that makes you immediately curious about what Cash does next.