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A Novel
by Cassandra Neyenesch
A "compulsively readable" (Sophie Stava, author of Count My Lies) novel about a San Diego housewife whose love affair with her neighbor's roofer is interrupted by a murder.
Perdita Jungfrau thought she was going to be married to her husband forever, so falling in love with Nando, her neighbor's anarcho-Marxist roofer, is a crisis. Life seems to put every possible obstacle in their way: she's pregnant, he has a girlfriend, he's fifteen years younger, she's terrified of messing up her children and equally drawn towards this magnetic man who entrusts her with his deepest secret.
Now it's three years later and Nando has been murdered.
As her bewildered husband tries to make sense of the wildly unpredictable person his wife has become, Perdita has other things on her mind. For starters, who is the mysterious woman sitting outside her house in a parked car all day? How can she stop her adored baby brother from being pulled under by his opioid addiction? Can someone with a childhood like hers ever be the mother her children deserve?
And most of all, what should she do with the searing memories of the affair which turned her life upside down?
"Mordantly funny and perfectly pitched….Original and hilarious." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"The plot hinges on a very substantial twist, but the book's real power lies less in the whodunit than in Perdita's singular interiority and caustic humor. There's much to admire in this off-kilter story of a woman's midlife crisis." —Publishers Weekly
"So charismatic and confiding; I felt as if I'd found my new (and very bad) best friend" —Eleanor Catton, award-winning author of The Luminaries
"In the enthralling A Little Bit Bad, a feisty true-crime obsessive's erotic awakening in the canyons of California embroils her in her very own murder mystery. Pretty much the platonic-ideal beach read." —Ada Calhoun, New York Times bestselling author of Crush
"A Little Bit Bad is wholly original and compulsively readable. It's fresh, dark, subversive and wildly compelling. I can't stop thinking about it. Neyenesch turns the suspense genre on its head in the best way; I couldn't get enough." —Sophie Stava, author of Count My Lies
This information about A Little Bit Bad was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Cassandra Neyenesch is a Brooklyn-based writer, activist, and curator. Neyenesch's reviews and cultural pieces have appeared in The Guardian, Brooklyn Rail, HuffPost, Public Books, The International Herald Tribune, and Art in America.
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