There Are Reasons For This by Nini Berndt

Named A Best Debut Book of the Year by Debutiful

“Nini Berndt wonderfully makes the strange familiar and the familiar strange. There Are Reasons for This immerses you in the unsettling but tender lives of its characters, whose yearning for connection powerfully mirrors our own. This is a truly memorable novel.” ―Claire Messud

Lucy’s brother, Mikey, is dead. Two years ago, when he left their small Eastern Colorado town and moved west to Denver, he’d intended to bring Lucy along. But Lucy has only just arrived, and too late. She arrives in search of Helen, a woman Mikey loved. But when Lucy moves in across the hall, she finds nothing is as she expected: the city is crumbling; the weather is tempestuous; a predator is on the loose; the old woman in the attic needs company; desire is being compressed into pills and distributed like candy; and, most distressing of all, she finds herself becoming obsessed with Helen, who is nothing like she expected—and who has no idea who Lucy really is.

As Helen’s and Lucy’s lives become more entwined, Lucy begins to realize the real reasons she came to Denver are deeper and stranger than a simple desire to understand what happened to her brother. As a storm builds and the city falls apart, Lucy finds herself drawn further to Helen, and farther from her brother, questioning what makes a family and if love can ever really be found.

There Are Reasons for This is a modern love song about the fallibility of love—in all its iterations—about the denial and tethering of desire, about the family we are given and the one we find for ourselves, and to what comes next, whatever that may be.