The weirdest, funniest family saga out there

In recent years, many column inches have been dedicated to the downtown New York literary scene and its hot twentysomething figureheads who are chronically online but also write autofiction and make zines in their spare time.

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Madeline Cash could easily fit the bill. The 29-year-old lived in Manhattan's Chinatown (though she recently traded it for Clapton), she started an indie magazine called Forever, and her first collection of short stories, Earth Angel, is summarised by her publisher as "the paperback that swallowed the smartphone".

Yet Cash defies the diaristic lit-girl trope with her delightfully wacky debut novel, Lost Lambs. Everything in the small-town world of the novel is made up, from the names of prescription drugs which various characters ingest to the town's church, Our Lady of Suffering, which is suffering from a gnat infestation. In a bit of typographical experimentation, the text is blighted by gnats, too exterminate is written as "extermignate"; natural as "gnatural".

Lost Lambs follows the Flynn family, who are all navigating highly peculiar matters of the heart. Head of the family Bud is toying with suicide after his creatively stifled wife, Catherine, has suggested opening up their marriage- or as she puts it, "expanding our horizons".