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. * Financial Times *
This sparkling debut is a true tour de force: unexpected, entertaining and genuinely funny... The most wildly original book of the year. * Harper's Bazaar *
The book every insider is reading before its release... Read it and let your mind go on an adventure. * Stylist *
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. * Lena Dunham *
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. * Megan Nolan, author of Ordinary Human Failings *
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. * Eric Puchner, New York Times bestselling author of Dream State *
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). * Ramona Ausubel, author of The Last Animal *
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. * Samantha Hunt, Women's Prize longlisted author of The Seas *
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. * Tony Tulathimutte, author of Rejection - National Book Award Finalist *
The nightmare of the now has a radiant and vicious new bard, and her name is Madeline Cash. * Sam Lipsyte, author of No One Left to Come Looking for You *
Like an epic road trip or a perfect dinner party, Lost Lambs is immersive and propulsive and I never wanted it to end. I can't remember the last time a novel made me laugh so hard or feel so much tenderness for its characters, this feral chorus of voices and desires, unhinged and witty and full of longing; I wanted to take care of them, hear their whispered confessions, stay up all night talking with them in the treehouse. Madeline Cash's prose is tuned to a singular radio channel no one else has ever found, where the music is part torch song, part power ballad, part heartbeat heard from the womb - strange and sweet and utterly surprising. I loved it. I devoured it. I can't wait for everyone else to hear it,