The Lamb

The Lamb (2025) is a feminist horror novel by Lucy Rose. The story follows 11‑year‑old Margot, who lives with her mother Ruth in an isolated cottage on the edge of an English forest. Ruth welcomes lost travelers—“strays”—with tea and tenderness, then butchers and eats them, teaching Margot this is the only way to survive. When a charismatic stranger named Eden arrives, the fragile world Ruth built begins to splinter, forcing Margot to confront hunger, loyalty, and how far she will go to claim her own life. Featuring cannibalistic mothers, dark forests, and a beleaguered but plucky child-heroine, the fable-like narrative explores themes such as The Problem of Parental Domination, Nature as Both Refuge and Danger, and The Importance of Breaking the Cycle of Abuse and Violence.

Lucy Rose is a writer and filmmaker known for short films such as Calm (2016). Rose lives and works in England. The Lamb, her first novel, became a Sunday Times bestseller on its release.

The guide is based on the Weidenfeld & Nicolson, Hachette UK 2025 Kindle edition.

Content Warning: The source text and this guide contain depictions of graphic violence, murder, child abuse, animal cruelty and death, bullying, and sexual content.

Plot Summary

Eleven-year-old Margot and her Mama, Ruth, live in a small, picturesque cottage at the edge of the woods. Ensconced in nature, their family seems cozy and close, but it harbors a little secret. Ruth and Margot are cannibals who lure “strays”—lost hikers and travelers—to their homestead, drug them with hemlock-laced wine, kill them, and consume them in perfect pies and stews. Though Margot attends the local school, she takes care to keep her mother’s secret, as her mother has directed. Margot thinks she and Ruth can stay safe forever, until her own nature begins to change. Ruth has always told Margot that Margot was born with a natural craving for human meat, but lately Margot has started questioning this. Margot has also started to realize that her mother’s parenting style is unsettling, with Ruth often hitting her and calling the resultant bruises “special kisses.”

One day, a stranger named Eden arrives. Eden, whose car supposedly blew a tire from the nails Ruth scatters on the road close to their cottage, comes seeking refuge. To Margot’s surprise, a smitten Ruth takes back the glass of poisoned wine from Eden before she can drink it, and invites her to stay the night. Eden becomes the first stray whom Ruth lets live, the two women quickly falling into an all-consuming love affair. As Ruth fixes her attention on Eden, Margot finds herself pushed out of her mother’s affection. Meanwhile, the local married gamekeeper with whom Eden had a brief affair returns to the cottage to rekindle their relationship. When the gamekeeper refuses to leave, Ruth takes another unprecedented action. To Margot’s shock, Ruth poisons and kills the gamekeeper, a man who is not a stray, even though his disappearance is bound to raise questions.

Eden readily accepts Ruth’s murder of the gamekeeper and even helps Ruth kill and cook him. However, Margot is seized with guilt at the prospect of eating the gamekeeper, since he is the father of her schoolmate Abbie. Margot is now forced to live a double life: one at school consoling Abbie about her father’s disappearance, and another consuming his body parts at home. Wrapped in Eden, Ruth grows increasingly impatient with Margot, hitting her more often. The driver of the school bus senses that Margot is subjected to violence at home, and frequently enquires about her domestic situation.

As Margot grows close to Abbie, her guilt only increases. She also finds out the truth about Eden: Eden did not chance upon the cottage; she was drawn to the presence of a kindred soul when she read stories about disappearances in Margot and Ruth’s neck of the woods. Firmly established in the household, Eden wants Ruth to become more selective about her hunts, lest she attract attention. Although Eden and Margot try to keep Ruth’s appetite sated with meat from caught rabbits, Ruth craves a stray. One day, Margot runs into an injured hiker in the woods. Sensing the woman is close to death, Margot thinks she is justified in bringing her home on the pretext of offering help. An overjoyed Ruth drugs and kills the woman. Since Margot brought them a stray, Eden and Ruth briefly soften toward her.

However, when they run out of stray-meat again, Ruth once again grows irritable, angry that Eden won’t let her hunt. She asks Margot to prove herself by finding another stray for her mother. Margot comes across a hiking woman, but lets her go. She tries to trap a man instead, but is unsuccessful. Margot’s failure makes Ruth turn against her. Margot then faces an episode of bullying at school. When a boy assaults Margot, she bites his finger, nearly taking the tip off. Ruth gets a call from the school about Margot’s actions. Enraged that Margot broke her cardinal rule of not drawing attention to their family, Ruth and Eden decide that the only way to manage Margot is to turn her into a stray.

The women seize Margot and lock her up in their bedroom, counting the days until Margot’s summer break before butchering her. In the meanwhile, they plan to fatten her up with cake and pies. Despite the grim future that awaits Margot, she decides to save others like Abbie and the bus driver, both of whom Ruth and Eden have threatened to eat. Margot secretly consumes Ruth’s stash of hemlock bit by bit so her meat grows poisoned. On the eve of her murder, Margot also throws in stored up hemlock in the stew pot so the women do not survive consuming her. Telling Margot that killing her is an act of kindness and love, Ruth and Eden drug and butcher her.

Margot’s spirit wakes up to see that Ruth and Eden have killed her. However, justice is delivered when the women cook and eat Margot in the stew pot and are poisoned to death by the hemlock. After a few days, the bus driver visits the cottage to enquire about Margot and discovers the rotting bodies of Margot, Ruth, and Eden. As the novel ends, police comb through the cottage, and Margot’s spirit, bound to the homestead, expresses satisfaction that by ending her own life, she made the cottage safe for others.