A Little Bit Bad

Cover of A Little Bit Bad

Reception

Rave reviews. 6 of 6 critics gave a rave.

Rave 6 · Positive 0 · Mixed 0 · Pan 0

  • “A Little Bit Bad , the debut novel by Cassandra Neyenesch, starts with a man falling off a ladder. Reading this gleefully disorienting story, you’ll know how he feels.”

    Ron Charles · Rave

2 more quotes
  • “Like All Fours , A Little Bit Bad has a careering plotline, flying between the everyday drudgery of mom-life, and a heightened, surreal or imagistic mode”

    The Guardian (UK) · Daisy Hildyard · Rave

  • “A Little Bit Bad has all the hallmarks of a witty thriller, but the split narrative timeline allows for more than mere mystery.”

    Times Literary Supplement (UK) · Sheena Joughin · Rave

All 6 reviews on Book Marks

  1. 2026
    Times Literary Supplement

    Reviewed by Sheena Joughin, 8 July

About the book

Read the full description

“A feisty true-crime obsessive’s erotic awakening.” —Ada Calhoun, author of Crush 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?

Description from Hardcover

Catalogue record

Penguin Random House NZ · 352 pages

Publisher
Penguin Random House NZ
Pages
352
ISBN
978-0-241-79290-2
Full recordClose
Publisher
Penguin Random House NZ
Pages
352
ISBN
  • 978-0-241-79290-2
Author
Neyenesch, Cassandra
Statement
A Little Bit Bad / Cassandra Neyenesch.
Records
Open Library

Catalogue data checked 4 October 2026