'Banal Nightmare will end summer with a bang. It's about turning 37 and realising you hate everybody you know.

So funny, so smart, utterly vicious - just brilliant' Zadie SmithMargaret 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. .