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A Little Bit Bad

I had tried to be a good person and live a nice, normal life. It wasn’t working out. Why was I such a no-but-er? I would be a yes-ander!... And after that moment, I didn’t give another little f*ck what I did.

Perdita Jungfrau thought she was going to be married to her husband forever, so falling in love with Nando, her neighbour'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 theirs 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?

Wholly original and compulsively readable ... 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

About Cassandra Neyenesch

Cassandra Neyenesch is a Brooklyn-based writer and curator whose reviews and cultural pieces have appeared in The Guardian, Brooklyn Rail, Huffington Post, Public Books, The International Herald Tribune, and Art in America.
Details
  • Imprint: Penguin
  • ISBN: 9781405984058
  • Length: 352 pages
  • Price: £8.99
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