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Which debuts novels should you be reading in 2026?

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The rising stars of 2026: discover the must-read debut novels of the year

Earth Angel

Cash’s stories can be funny, inventive, linguistically exciting, and feel genuinely new. The brutality they trade on conjures depressingly convincing portraits of our ongoing modernity, realer than real

Cash’s heroines are all earth angels but none so much as presence in these stories of the author herself, whose style has a devilish (remember Satan was an angel) and celestial powers, quite apart from the characters and scenarios Cash has imagined.

Cash’s stories are a reminder of what fiction can do when it’s allowed to break the rules, express its moment, turn the despairing or the banal into something better.

The stories in [Cash's] book are bizarre in the way that only a writer with her precision can employ.

Madeline’s debut story collection reads like a captivating lucid dream.

Uncanny, poetic, and bleakly funny, Earth Angel reaches for a higher power in a society that has forgotten how to believe.

[Cash] pushes her characters a step further than expected, hooks them up to an IV filled with irony, and watches as they degrade on their own slippery slopes.

To read Madeline Cash is to mainline her apocalyptic vitality, to witness a rare vision realized with an untamed sense of control, to light your cigarette off of the flames from her burning heart.

Justin Taylor, author of Riding with the Ghost

I enjoyed Madeline's stories a lot. They're weird and funny and dead-pan, and they explore interesting, under-examined topics.

Tao Lin, author of Taipei and Leave Society

A brutal, funny and dizzying fever dream of a book. Madeline Cash’s stories read like the musings of a brilliant boarding school girl sucking on a DMT vape pen: an entire universe, vivid and writhing, is revealed beneath her placid stare. This is an electric debut.

Madeline Cash's short stories blaze through the Culture with supreme confidence, agility, and wit... What a bold, promising debut by such a one-of-a-kind young writer.

I don't know what I can tell you about Earth Angel. In one way, it is the story of one million strong, beautiful, upper middle class women in modern America, and in another, truer way, it is an unhinged, joyous nosedive through every wild thought you've ever had played out real tender, like a movie. I love this book, please read it.

Sasha Fletcher, author of Be Here to Love Me at the End of the World

Raucously endearing, worldly but clear-souled, Earth Angel introduces an uncanny and crucial new voice. There isn't anything Madeline Cash doesn't know about the ruckussy graces of our present moment. I was laughing so hard, I didn't realize how fast my heart was breaking.

The stories collected in Earth Angel are like candy-pink nostalgia pills, crushed up and snorted during a weekend slumber party with your inner adolescent in the bedroom of your youth. Hilarious, insightful, and extremely online, this is the best debut I’ve read in years.

Earth Angel is vigorous, hilarious and demented. The nightmare of the now has a radiant and vicious new bard, and her name is Madeline Cash.

The stories in Earth Angel are playful, charming, and a little bit devious -this is a striking debut by a writer to watch.

Chelsea Hodson, author of Tonight I'm Someone Else

If this is downtown Catholicism, this is its darkest, funniest, most nihilistic incarnation yet. The question of who - or what - is being skewered in these stories is an open one, but their sharpness is undeniable.

Lindsy Lerman, author of What Are You and I’m from Nowhere

Madeline Cash is at the vanguard of a new literature, one calibrated to the speed, madness and incomprehensibility of our modern world. The stories in Earth Angel - madcap, irreverent, and weirdly heartbreaking - race by like an Adderall-laced dream. But at the heart of this innovative, hilarious, original book is something as old as consciousness itself: pain.

Madeline Cash twirls through the detritus of our ravaged modern age in her charming debut, Earth Angel. Armed with an electric humour, Cash spins glittering tales of a physical world in decline, a surveillance culture lit by glaring LEDs that is dispossessed and irreverent, having forgotten how heavy with meaning it is.

Jen George, author of The Babysitter at Rest

Earth Angel is wonderfully vibrant and fresh. Madeline's stories are smart, hilarious, heartbreaking, and sharp. A glimmer of hope in the time of modern America.

Madeline Cash is the founder of Forever Magazine and the author of the story collection Earth Angel. Her fiction has appeared in Granta, The Baffler, The Sewanee Review, The Drift, and Bomb, among other publications. Lost Lambs is her debut novel.

In this reissue of her debut collection, Madeline Cash, the author of Lost Lambs, skewers our late-stage-Capitalist reality into a strange, but ultimately life-affirming collage of stories. 
 
Life is absurd, so is Earth Angel. 
 
A biblical plague rains sentient frogs, a childless millennial throws a slumber party, a young couple try experimental drugs to reignite their relationship. Tales of rebellious school girls and apocalypse-fearing marketing executives. 
 
Blending reverence and ridicule, the stories that make up Earth Angel are bizarre, playful, inextricably linked, hyper-modern yet timeless. What shines through is Cash’s undeniable affection for the denizens of this strange and surreal world – a place that is at times dark, but not without hope for the future.

Madeline Cash

Laugh-out-loud funny, unexpectedly moving – Lost Lambs is both a blistering satire of our present moment and a compassionate portrait of a family trying to stay human in Musk’s America.

Lost Lambs was a delight! It’s eccentric, funny, deeply human, and full of characters you can’t stop thinking about. Madeline Cash has such a distinct voice, balancing absurdity with genuine emotion in a way that feels effortless. I loved every page and already wish I could read it again for the first time.

I laughed so hard I slipped a disc. I read this book 14 times, I’m fanatical about it. I want to know this family, live in this town, and help solve this timely mystery. I have separation anxiety from these characters I love them so much.

Discover this deluxe limited edition hardback of the book everyone is talking about 
 
 
‘I LOVED IT, I RACED THROUGH IT. IT'S JUST FANTASTIC WRITING’ SARAH JESSICA PARKER 
 
‘EXTREMELY SMART, IMPOSSIBLY FUNNY, AND JUST PLAIN FUN TO READ’ CARO CLAIRE BURKE, AUTHOR OF YESTERYEAR 
 
‘A VOICE LIKE NO OTHER’ LENA DUNHAM 
 
 
Think your family is dysfunctional? Meet the Flynns. 
 
 
For the three Flynn daughters, it’s been disastrous since their parents opened up their marriage. Abigail, the eldest, is dating an ex-soldier several years her senior nicknamed ‘War Crimes Wes’. Louise, the middle child, maintains a secret correspondence with an online terrorist. And the brilliant youngest, Harper, is being sent to a wilderness reform camp due to her insistence that someone – or something – is monitoring the town’s citizens. 
 
Casting a shadow across their lives 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. 
 
The instant Sunday Times bestseller 
 
SHORTLISTED FOR THE WATERSTONES DEBUT FICTION PRIZE 2026 
 
'I LAUGHED SO HARD I SLIPPED A DISC' BILLIE PIPER 
 
'ECCENTRIC, FUNNY, DEEPLY HUMAN... I LOVED EVERY PAGE' EMMA ROBERTS 
 
‘THE MOST WILDLY ORIGINAL BOOK OF THE YEAR’ HARPER’S BAZAAR 
 
‘THE DEBUT NOVEL FOR 2026 THAT HAS UNDOUBTEDLY BEEN THE MOST SHOUTED ABOUT’ THE SUNDAY TIMES STYLE 
 
‘A DARKLY FUNNY FAMILY SAGA’ BUSTLE 
 
‘AN INSTANT CLASSIC’ SHORTLIST

Madeline Cash

Praise for Lost Lambs

Laugh-out-loud funny, unexpectedly moving – Lost Lambs is both a blistering satire of our present moment and a compassionate portrait of a family trying to stay human in Musk’s America.

Lost Lambs was a delight! It’s eccentric, funny, deeply human, and full of characters you can’t stop thinking about. Madeline Cash has such a distinct voice, balancing absurdity with genuine emotion in ...

I laughed so hard I slipped a disc. I read this book 14 times, I’m fanatical about it. I want to know this family, live in this town, and help solve this timely mystery. I have separation anxiety from thes ...

Laugh-out-loud funny, unexpectedly moving – Lost Lambs is both a blistering satire of our present moment and a compassionate portrait of a family trying to stay human in Musk’s America.

Lost Lambs was a delight! It’s eccentric, funny, deeply human, and full of characters you can’t stop thinking about. Madeline Cash has such a distinct voice, balancing absurdity with genuine emotion in ...

I laughed so hard I slipped a disc. I read this book 14 times, I’m fanatical about it. I want to know this family, live in this town, and help solve this timely mystery. I have separation anxiety from thes ...

Laugh-out-loud funny, unexpectedly moving – Lost Lambs is both a blistering satire of our present moment and a compassionate portrait of a family trying to stay human in Musk’s America.

Lost Lambs was a delight! It’s eccentric, funny, deeply human, and full of characters you can’t stop thinking about. Madeline Cash has such a distinct voice, balancing absurdity with genuine emotion in ...

I laughed so hard I slipped a disc. I read this book 14 times, I’m fanatical about it. I want to know this family, live in this town, and help solve this timely mystery. I have separation anxiety from thes ...

Books by Madeline Cash

Articles featuring Madeline Cash

Which debuts novels should you be reading in 2026?

The rising stars of 2026: discover the must-read debut novels of the year

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