Cassandra Neyenesch

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

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

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

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

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

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

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?

Cassandra Neyenesch

Praise for A Little Bit Bad

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Follow penguin

Follow ladybird

Follow puffin

Sign up to the Penguin newsletter