A Little Bit Bad
The dazzlingly wild and darkly funny debut novel about desire, obsession, motherhood and marriage
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- £8.99
Publisher Description
'This darkly funny, slippery novel is a hoot to read and will please fans of Miranda July’s All Fours' The i Paper
'A sparkling and subversive debut ... this tragicomic tale of an American woman’s illicit romance is also a gripping murder mystery' Guardian
'Compelling ... full of wisdom on addiction, obsession, motherhood and marriage' Daily Mail
Perdita Jungfrau thought she was going to be married to her husband forever, so falling in love with Nando, her ‘anarcho-Marxist’ handyman, 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 that turned her life upside down?
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Neyenesch's darkly funny debut splices a murder mystery with a torrid extramarital affair between a sleep-deprived new mother and her roofer. Set to great effect in San Diego, the novel centers on Perdita Jungfrau, a middle-aged therapist mired in postpartum burnout and marital resentment, who meets sad-eyed anarchist-Marxist Nando Acuña, 15 years younger, while he's working on her neighbor's roof in 2007. They bond over music—she used to be in a feminist rockabilly band, which she describes as sounding like "Kate Bush falling down a flight of stairs," and he plays drums. In 2010, after their affair implodes, Nando is gunned down in what may or may not be a random mugging, and Perdita comes to suspect that his wealthy ex-girlfriend—whose canyon-view home she envies—is stalking her. Neyenesch writes with scorching candor about the isolation and boredom that drives Perdita to pursue Nando with increasing desperation, "deranged by obsessive love." To her chagrin, Perdita discovers that Nando "wasn't hot in an offbeat way that was special to me—he was totally hot," and something of a lady-killer. 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.
