There Are Reasons For This

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."Imaginative and brooding…. Poignant and sexy; brilliantly captures the hushed nihilism of living on a dying planet."—Kirkus, Starred Review

"Stunning…. Berndt’s prose is lovely and stinging, and overall the novel is tense, full of beauty and sorrow. It is a sincere but also strange, gorgeous, smart and challenging … exploration of love and need, want and choice. This is a highly recommended book."—Bookreporter

"If the immersive writing in this debut novel is any indication, I predict Berndt’s future books will be downright addictive."—5280 Magazine

"Enticing…. The character work is as sharp as the plotting in this suspenseful yet introspective narrative."—Publishers Weekly

"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, author of This Strange Eventful History

"There Are Reasons for This is haunting and incantatory, a perfectly calibrated exploration of longing, lust, and life after a tremendous loss. Nini Berndt is one of my all-time favorite writers—her prose is sublime, fearless, and full of heat. This is a blistering, brutally beautiful debut from a formidable talent." —Kimberly King Parsons, author of We Were the Universe

"There Are Reasons for This is messy-beautiful, gorgeous, compelling. I was struck by the want depicted here; a specific hurt that comes from finding something kindred only to wind up losing it. Nini Berndt makes lovely work of this bruise-writing, the kind of devastation that leaves you with your fist pressed to your lips, aching hard for everyone involved. This is a queer gut punch of a novel. I adored it." —Kristen Arnett, author of With TeethNini Berndt is a graduate of the MFA program in Fiction at the University of Florida. She teaches at Lighthouse Writers Workshop in Denver, where she lives with her wife and son.