Lost Lambs cover art

Lost Lambs
Pre-order with offer Pre-order: Try Premium Plus free
Offer ends 29 January 2026 at 11:59PM GMT.
Prime members: New to Audible? Get 2 free audiobooks during trial.
Just £0.99/mo for your first 3 months of Audible.
1 bestseller or new release per month—yours to keep.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, podcasts, and Originals.
Auto-renews at £8.99/mo after 3 months. Cancel monthly.
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection - including bestsellers and new releases.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, celeb exclusives, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
£8.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically.

Lost Lambs

By: Madeline Cash
Narrated by: Christine Lakin
Pre-order with offer Pre-order: Try Premium Plus free

£8.99/mo after 3 months. Cancel monthly. Offer ends 29 January 2026 at 11:59PM GMT.

£8.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically. See here for eligibility.

Pre-order Now for £12.99

Pre-order Now for £12.99

LIMITED TIME OFFER | £0.99/mo for the first 3 months

Premium Plus auto-renews at £8.99/mo after 3 months. Terms apply.

About this listen

Brought to you by Penguin.

The funny and compassionate new literary novel that turns family dysfunction into an art form.

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.

Rippling with humour, warmth and style, Lost Lambs turns family dysfunction into an art form.

‘A voice like no other’ Lena Dunham, award-winning writer, director and creator of comedy-drama Girls

'Loud, hilarious, shocking and sensitive' Megan Nolan, prize-listed author of Acts of Desperation

© Madeline Cash 2025 (P) Penguin Audio 2025

 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 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.
Lost Lambs goes off like a firework. Intrigue and mystery burst outward while the family at the centre of the story implodes. What I loved most were the big, seeking hearts of Madeline Cash's characters as they reach awkwardly toward love and connection – this novel is as sincere as it is funny (and it’s very funny).
Lost Lambs is wild. It struts. Madeline Cash calls us into a vividly imagined world, a Pynchon-paradise absurd enough to actually create a great, great American novel.
With a big surge of energy, Lost Lambs splits the nucleus of the American family – look into the flash and you'll see teen terrorists, smoking hot handywomen, and the most suicidal suburban dad this side of John Cheever. Madeline Cash likes to get dark, but fortunately the dark is where her writing glows.
No reviews yet