Banal Nightmare
- Author Halle Butler
- Narrator Ruby McCollister
- Publisher Orion
- Publish Date 16 July 2024
- Run Time 9 hours and 38 minutes
- Format Audio
- Genre Fiction: general and literary.
Flexible Pricing & Rewards For Listening
At xigxag, the more you read, the less you pay* on select audiobook and x-book® titles, as in the table below. Pricing updates automatically in the app and resets one year after your first purchase. And you can always find a selection of brilliant titles available for only £3.99.
Titles Purchased
- 1-5
- 6-10
- 11-15
- 16-20
- Over 20
Price per title
- £8.99
- £7.99
- £6.99
- £5.99
- £4.99
*Only the full price titles you buy count toward your personal pricing tier. Full price titles don’t include Listen for Less or other books bought with a voucher or discount code.
Listen to a sample
What to expect
'So funny, so smart, utterly vicious - just brilliant' ZADIE SMITH
'Butler's sense of humour should be studied and celebrated' DAVID SEDARIS
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
'Butler's sense of humour should be studied and celebrated' DAVID SEDARIS
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
Critics Review
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
The best, and also the most hilarious, new novel I've read in the past year
I inhaled that book. Such a vivid, gripping, and hilarious voice that Butler has. Everything is familiar but heightened and slightly askew. I was deeply charmed and moved
The Feel Bad Novel of the Year . . . darkly humorous and brutally honest
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
Butler has crafted a novel in which every character proves to be completely, uniquely crazy. Her sense of humour should be studied and celebrated
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
Highly intelligent, witty and completely precise in its skewering
I loved Banal Nightmare. I was laughing and underlining and laughing. I'm recommending it to so many people. Halle Butler is an absolute genius
In Halle Butler's world, everyone hates each other, every day is excruciating in its mundanity, every thought is the beginning of an Escherian journey round and round in hell, and somehow the whole thing is unbelievably funny. With the force of an episode of marijuana psychosis and the extreme detail of a hyperrealistic work of art, Banal Nightmare attempts transcendence through anxiety and dissociation, nailing a series of contemporary characters - better pray you're not one of them - to the wall
Brilliantly observed and unsparing, Banal Nightmare is an intense, exhilarating, often-hilarious kaleidoscopic inquiry into contemporary relationships. With the comprehensive social gaze of Balzac and the cold logic of Renata Adler, Halle Butler conjures a latticework structure of life, rage, dark humor, and incalculable grace
Oh man, this book! Halle Butler's new novel is a blistering assault on contemporary pieties about art and love, an epic Woolfian tapestry of perfect comic rants, terrifying panic attacks, and, most gratifying of all, sincere attempts at human connection. This is the best, most ambitious book yet by one of my favourite writers
Halle Butler's Banal Nightmare is a masterpiece, her best book yet. It burns with a wild, unforgiving fire, making most other novels seem vague and ho-hum in comparison. This novel exhibits an eerily spot-on understanding of the private mind as it delves deep into an array of lives, revealing harrowing experiences of loneliness, love, heartbreak, abuse, malaise, depression, obsession, hatred, and revenge. No feeling is skipped over. No thought is simplified. No idea is dumbed down. Like a knife dancing through air, it's a manic, nerve-wracking read, painful and so weirdly funny. I felt gripped by it from beginning to end . . . an unapologetic, totally original, modern marvel
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
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
The voice of a (tired, furious, disappointed, disoriented) generation
Butler is a master at constructing a detailed social hierarchy of educated women . . . I laughed out loud
A brilliantly funny dissection of adult life. Relatable, even if you don't want it to be
Banal Nightmare is actually funny. Reader, I laughed many times. It doesn't merely gesture to humour. Butler has comic range
Putting a new spin on what it means to be a killjoy, Bulter delivers an emotionally riveting account of modern adulthood
A skilled and clever prose stylist who humanely spotlights the most ridiculous parts of being alive in this surprising and hilarious book
| Author | Halle Butler |
|---|---|
| Narrator | Ruby McCollister |
| Duration | 9 hours and 38 minutes |
| Release Date | |
| ISBN | 9781399618250 |
| Format | Audiobook |
| Publisher | Orion |
| Genre | Fiction: general and literary |
| Availability | AU, GB, IE |
More from the same
Author
About xigxag
xigxag is an independent, UK-based audiobook platform and the UK’s only B Corp certified audiobook company. We offer nearly 150,000 audiobooks, all with professional human narration. No AI-generated voices. xigxag is rated an Ethical Consumer Best Buy for audiobooks and a top-rated ethical bookshop.
There is no subscription. You buy the audiobooks you want, you own them permanently, and prices start at £8.99. The more you listen over the year, the less you pay per book, and there is always a selection in Listen for Less from £3.99. You can also send audiobooks as gifts using our audiobook gift cards or in-app gifting.
Every audiobook on xigxag has honest reviews covering both the book and the narration, and our community features make it easy to share what you are listening to, discover what others recommend, and find your next listen.
Download or stream on iOS, Android, or in your browser. Browse the full catalogue at xigxag.co.uk.