'So funny, so smart, utterly vicious - just brilliant' ZADIE SMITH

'Butler's sense of humour should be studied and celebrated' DAVID SEDARIS

'Halle Butler is a first-rate satirist of the horror show being sold to us as Modern Femininity. She is Thomas Bernhard in a bad mood, wearing ill-fitting tights, scrutinizing old take-out leftovers' CATHERINE LACEY

'The voice of a (tired, furious, disappointed, disoriented) generation' LITHUB

Margaret Anne ('Moddie') Yance has just returned to her hometown, to mingle with the friends of her youth, to get back in touch with her roots, and to recover from a stressful decade of living in the city in a small apartment with a man she now believed to be a megalomaniac or perhaps a covert narcissist.

Back home, Moddie throws herself at the mercy of her old friends, all suddenly tipping toward middle age. She joins them as they go to parties, size each other up, obsess over past slights, dream of wild triumphs, and indulge in elaborate revenge fantasies.

But when a mysterious artist arrives in town to take up a residency at the local university, Moddie has no choice but to confront the demons of her past and grapple with the reality of what her life has become.

The inimitable Halle Butler, author of The New Me, returns with a novel that is sadistically precise, completely singular and horribly funny

"The Feel Bad Novel of the Year . . . darkly humorous and brutally honest" - Electric Lit

"Halle Butler is one of the funniest and most exacting novelists of millennial precarity. Banal Nightmare is worth reading just to experience Butler's virtuosic prose. Deadpan, hyper-articulate, quietly affecting" - Guardian

"So searingly precise in its ability to capture a certain moment or experience that you have to stop every few pages to send another perfect quote to your group chat . . . It will be immediately and uncomfortably relatable to anyone who has spent nights chain-smoking on a balcony, contemplating their own personal, sexual and social mistakes" - New York Times

"Butler's talent lies in depicting how these sore winners think, and the quiet madness that comes from measuring every interaction in your life by what might be gained in power and status . . . Her most accomplished novel" - New York Review of Books

"Butler writes with a bee-sting-sharp sense of humor and irony, and nothing is sacred, not Hillary Clinton, not Ruth Bader Ginsburg, not Christine Blasey Ford's testimony before Congress. What's most surprising is that this cooler-than-the-cool-kids novel actually has an emotional center that will make your pulse race. . . . A tart, irreverent rant of a novel that takes a sharp turn toward something more serious" - Kirkus Reviews

"The voice of a (tired, furious, disappointed, disoriented) generation" - LitHub

"Butler is a master at constructing a detailed social hierarchy of educated women . . . I laughed out loud" - Chicago Reader

"A brilliantly funny dissection of adult life. Relatable, even if you don't want it to be" - Our Culture

"Banal Nightmare is actually funny. Reader, I laughed many times. It doesn't merely gesture to humour. Butler has comic range" - The Times

"Putting a new spin on what it means to be a killjoy, Bulter delivers an emotionally riveting account of modern adulthood" - Booklist

"A skilled and clever prose stylist who humanely spotlights the most ridiculous parts of being alive in this surprising and hilarious book" - Vulture