Miranda July’s first novel begins inside the tightly managed life of Cheryl Glickman, a middle-aged woman whose routines, private theories and longstanding obsession with an older colleague have become something...shitty?

Enter Clee. Clee is the violent, selfish twenty-one-year-old daughter of Cheryl’s bosses, who then moves into her house and begins dismantling it. It becomes a series of distortions then onwards, where hostility becomes ritual, ritual becomes intimacy, and July pushes motherhood, desire, fantasy and bodily attachment into places fiction often fears touching.

Like July’s films and short fiction, The First Bad Man is built from emotional situations that sound ridiculous when described and become unbearably exact once you are inside them. Its characters are needy, delusional, sexually deviant and often appalling, but the novel never treats eccentricity as decoration. A book truly about desire, its friends, and its enemies.

Scribner, New York, 2015. First edition, first printing. Hardcover with dust jacket. Jacket shows moderate rubbing and edge wear, with small chips and abrasions at corners and extremities; boards and interior remain clean, binding firm. Very good book in good to very good jacket. The copyright page confirms this as the first Scribner hardcover edition and the complete number line indicates a first printing.