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Lost Lambs

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Lost Lambs

By: Madeline Cash
Narrated by: Christine Lakin
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About this listen

Brought to you by Penguin.

Think your family is dysfunctional? Meet the Flynns.

For the three Flynn daughters, it’s been disastrous since their parents opened up their marriage. Abigail, the eldest, is dating an ex-soldier several years her senior nicknamed ‘War Crimes Wes’. Louise, the middle child, maintains a secret correspondence with an online terrorist. And the brilliant youngest, Harper, is being sent to a wilderness reform camp due to her insistence that someone – or something – is monitoring the town’s citizens.

Casting a shadow across their lives is Paul Alabaster, a nefarious local billionaire. Rumours of corruption circulate, but no one dares dig too deep. No one except Harper, whose obsession with Alabaster’s machinations sends the family hurtling into a criminal conspiracy – one that may just, finally, bring them closer together.

The instant Sunday Times bestseller

‘A voice like no other’ Lena Dunham

‘If the Royal Tenenbaums were middle-class and likable, they’d be this madcap family.’ The New York Times

‘Manages to capture something we can all universally relate to: how normal it is to have a dysfunctional family’ Sunday Times


© Madeline Cash 2026 (P) Penguin Audio 2026

 Dark Humour Family Life Genre Fiction Literary Fiction Literature & Fiction Small Town & Rural Funny

Critic reviews

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 21st-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.
This type of slapstick satire is what makes Cash’s novel so enjoyable... What is so appealing about this debut is that 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.
Cash’s virtuosic wit allows her to warm hearts at the same time as satirising 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 energising new voice.
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.
This sparkling debut is a true tour de force: unexpected, entertaining and genuinely funny... The most wildly original book of the year.
The book every insider is reading before its release... Read it and let your mind go on an adventure.
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.
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, we will all remember Lost Lambs as the beginning of a long and thrilling career.
What an absolute scream: a checkerboard of deep shadows and dazzling light, spanning suburban ennui, internet conspiracies and dysfunctional families. I can’t even begin to describe how much I loved this sharp, irreverent novel. Madeline Cash is a total hoot.
A wonderful new comic voice. I’ve read entire books that contain less wit and inventiveness than a single one of 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.
All stars
Most relevant
Well drawn characters that made me laugh, a wild romp of a story line and yet still a family tale full of love. Try it .. you won’t be disappointed! Also a great narrator. I listened to this book at 1.2 speed.

Such fun - great characters and a wild story line!

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I absolutely LOVED this book!! Unusual story and characters, it’s surprising and hilarious!! I think my favourite book of the year so far and I cannot recommend it highly enough!!

Brilliant!!

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All the rave reviews said it was ‘quirky’, ‘funny’ but very early into the text I felt I had trodden in something very unpleasant. This was not a good novel but more an example of ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes’ which is happening more and more.

Needed better editing

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The reviews promised a quirky and witty tale. The few moments of genuine humour were not enough to salvage this from unlikable characters and the implausible storyline was just that: implausible, not engaging. A waste of a credit. I wanted to cleanse my brain when it had finished.
The narrator did a great job capturing the essence of the book. I hope they paid her a lot for this one.

Alienated characters alienated me

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