Lost Sheep

Reading and conversation with Samuela Benke (German-English)
presented by Thalia

Madeline Cash comes to the Harbour Front Literature Festival as an author who has already attracted unusual attention in the USA and Great Britain. Her debut "Lost Sheep" is an ostensibly typical family novel that begins as suburban idyll, of which only the facade remains: mother, father, three daughters, a house, Sundays at church. Catherine has opened the marriage, Bud has moved into the minivan in the garage, the kitchen stays empty, the children drift through their own small catastrophes. Abigail, the eldest, meets a taciturn ex-soldier. Louise, the overlooked middle child, has gotten caught in a dangerous relationship spiral online. Harper, twelve years old and exceptionally gifted, believes she has stumbled upon a conspiracy. What begins as a portrait of family breakdown soon expands: into a parish community plagued by pests, to a dubious self-help group, near a corrupt harbour and a billionaire desperately trying to escape aging.

Cash tells this world with dry pace and dark humour. From a satirical family novel emerges a book about the present day, about the American middle class and our reality - about religious remnants, body optimization, fantasies of control, and digital lostness. Her precise, irreverent wit has been especially praised. Thea Dorn called the novel in Literarischen Quartett "one of the most brilliant novel debuts of recent years".
"Madeline Cash is one of the most talented writers of the New York literary scene and a beacon of hope for a new beginning of the contemporary novel: biting, witty, irreverent, self-assured and simply entertaining.