The First Bad Man: A Novel

New York Times Bestseller

The “brilliant, hilarious, irreverent, piercing” (O, The Oprah Magazine) debut novel from Miranda July, acclaimed filmmaker, artist, and author of All Fours.

Cheryl Glickman believes in romances that span centuries and a soul that migrates between babies. She works at a women’s self-defense nonprofit and lives alone. When her bosses ask if their twenty-year-old daughter, Clee, can move into her house for a while, Cheryl’s eccentrically ordered world explodes. And yet it is Clee—the selfish, cruel blond bombshell—who bullies Cheryl into reality and, unexpectedly, leads her to the love of a lifetime.

Tender, gripping, slyly hilarious, infused with raging sexual fantasies and fierce maternal love, Miranda July’s first novel confirms her as a spectacularly original, iconic, and important voice today, and a writer for all time.

Miranda July is a writer, filmmaker, and artist. Her debut novel, The First Bad Man, was an instant New York Times bestseller, and her collection of stories, No One Belongs Here More Than You, won the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award and has been published in twenty-three countries. Her writing has appeared in The Paris Review, Harper’s, and The New Yorker, and she is also the author of the novel All Fours, a finalist for the 2024 National Book Award for Fiction. In 2025 she was named one of the 100 most influential people by Time and received a Guggenheim Fellowship. July lives in Los Angeles.