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A Little Bit Bad
  • Published: 5 May 2026
  • ISBN: 9781405987387
  • Imprint: Penguin Audio
  • Format: Audio Download
  • RRP: $32.00

A Little Bit Bad

Formats & editions
Tr. Paperback
5 May 2026
Hardback
5 June 2026
EBook
5 May 2026
Audiobook
5 May 2026
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Big Swiss meets All Fours in this dazzlingly wild, darkly funny debut about desire and obsession, motherhood and marriage and the irresistible intoxication of blowing up your life

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 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?
  • Published: 5 May 2026
  • ISBN: 9781405987387
  • Imprint: Penguin Audio
  • Format: Audio Download
  • RRP: $32.00
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About the author

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.
CN

Praise for A Little Bit Bad

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

Enthralling: 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, author of Crush

A Little Bit Bad is a wild ride. Neyenesch has a totally original voice and a fresh perspective on life

Esther Walker

Sexy, dangerous, shocking, funny - A Little Bit Bad Is to die for. The most fun you can have with a novel. Perdita is the best bitch in modern fiction yet the anti-heroine we all want and need in our lives

Rachel Johnson

So charismatic and confiding; I felt as if I'd found my new (and very bad) best friend

Eleanor Catton, author of Birnam Wood

The ripple effects of Miranda July's hugely successful All Fours can be seen in several debuts this year that address sex, desire and monogamy. A Little Bit Bad by Cassandra Neyenesch concerns a woman who has an affair with her neighbour's roofer

BBC – The 40 most exciting books to look forward to in 2026

Structurally thrilling, viciously funny and subversive. Neyenesch’s magnetic narrator says the unsayable and thinks the unforgivable – and I would follow her anywhere. I adored every wicked page

Catherine Chidgey, author of The Book of Guilt

Mordantly funny and perfectly pitched….Original and hilarious

Kirkus Reviews