Madeline Cash’s debut novel, Lost Lambs, starts well. Unfulfilled as a housewife in a small suburb on America’s west coast, Catherine Flynn suggests to her husband, Bud, that they see other people. The narrator calls this their ‘arrangement’. For Bud, who dislikes the term ‘polyamory’ (‘It sounded like a skin disease’), this is ‘their nonconsensual non-monogamous spell’. But while he is sleeping in the family minivan, the couple’s three daughters – Harper, Abigail and Louise – are descending into delinquency, having been suspended from school on several charges (truancy, violence, an ‘attempted act of domestic terrorism’). Each chapter follows a different member of the family, or one of their associates, including Father Andrew – who ‘hadn’t studied Latin at the seminary’ but ‘majored instead in French Cinema’ – and the dowdy Miss Winkle, with whom Bud has an unconventional affair.  

Cash, who co-founded the indie publication Forever Magazine with Anika Jade Levy (the author of last year’s Flat Earth), began her career with a collection of humorous short stories, Earth Angel (2023), which revealed her fascination with the absurd. (One story, ‘The Jester’s Privilege’, is narrated by a marketing assistant