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

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‘Goes off like a firework. As sincere as it is funny (and it’s very funny)’ Ramona Ausubel

‘Lost Lambs is wild. It struts’ Samantha Hunt

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The Flynns are not alright.

It’s been disastrous since Bud and Catherine opened up their marriage, and none of the Flynns can remember the last time a meal was cooked, a load of laundry done, or a social code abided by. 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 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.

This is an original, funny and compassionate portrait of the perverse pleasures and perils of our most intimate reality: our family.

‘With a big surge of energy, Lost Lambs splits the nucleus of the American family’ Tony Tulathimutte

‘Madeline Cash is a humourist in the darkly humanist tradition of George Saunders and Lorrie Moore, of Vonnegut and Twain’ Tim Kreider