Description
What would killing him accomplish? Nothing, mostly.Then again, neither would letting him live.It’s Hester’s fortieth birthday when she’s diagnosed with terminal cancer, and she knows immediately what she must do: abandon her possessions and drive to California to kill her estranged father. With no friends or family tying her to the life she’s built in New York City, she quits her wildly lucrative job in corporate law and sets off. She hasn’t made it far when she runs into John, an environmental activist in need of a ride to different superfund sites across the United States. From five-star Midwestern hotels to cultish Southwestern compounds, the two slowly make their way across the country. But will the revelations they make along the way dissuade Hester from her final goal?Ragingly singular and surprisingly moving, combining tragic intensity and pitch-black humour, Bad Nature is the incendiary debut novel from Ariel Courage. Part road trip, part revenge tale, part a lament of our ongoing ecological crisis, it’s ultimately a deft examination of the indulgence of holding grudges, moral ambivalence, and the eternal possibility of redemption.
Additional information
| Weight | 0.6 kg |
|---|---|
| Dimensions | 4 × 13.5 × 21.6 cm |
| Format | Paperback |
| language1 | |
| Pages | 304 |
| Publisher | |
| Year Published | 2025-4-17 |
| Imprint | |
| Publication City/Country | London, United Kingdom |
| ISBN 10 | 1784745715 |
| About The Author | Ariel Courage is a graduate of the Brooklyn College MFA program, where she was editor-in-chief of The Brooklyn Review. She's currently an assistant fiction editor at AGNI Magazine. Her short work has appeared in Guernica, The New Limestone Review, and Works Progress, and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She was also a 2019 Kimmel Harding Nelson resident. |
| Review Quote | 'Add Hester to the canon of unlikeable female characters I can’t look away from, and Bad Nature to novels I couldn’t put down. Dark, aloof, disciplined – this novel is reminiscent of the best of Ottessa Moshfegh or Emma Cline. I thought it was brilliant.' |
| Other text | 'Wicked and wickedly funny, Ariel Courage’s debut Bad Nature is a dark romp of a book, a road-trip novel propelled by a revenge plot. Nihilism and optimism collide in this story featuring a woman who is simultaneously confronting her childhood and her death. Hester is a caustic yet irresistible narrator, and this evocation of her journey across America reads as both hate mail and love letter to a complex country. Bad Nature is raw, intense, and absolutely mesmerising.' |



