Dua Lipa's September Book Club Pick! Included in The Guardian 's Best Translated Fiction of
2024 "[ Bad Habit ] shows us that a 'trans novel' can actually be anything it wants to be." –
New York Times "A novel that could very well serve as a surrogate mother for future children
who grow up lonely and trans." – Washington Post Combining the raw realism and vulnerability of
Shuggie Bain and Detransition Baby with the poignant sensibility of Pedro Almodóvar a
staggering coming-of-age novel deeply rooted in the struggles of a trans woman growing up in
Madrid. Anchored by the voice of its sweet and defiant narrator Bad Habit casts a trans
woman’s trying youth as a heartfelt odyssey. Raised in an animated yet impoverished blue-collar
neighborhood Alana S. Portero’s protagonist struggles to find her place. As the city around
her changes–the heroin epidemic that ravages Madrid through the '80s and '90s rallying calls
of worker solidarity and the pulsing beat of the city's night scene– she becomes increasingly
detached from the world and most crucially herself. Yet through her eyes the streets and
people of Madrid are illuminated by a poetry absent from everyday life. And by this guiding
light she begins to plot her own course from Margarita the local trans woman whose unspoken
kinship both captivates and frightens her to Jay her first love and source of an inevitable
heartbreak to the irrepressible diva Caramel. As she forges ahead she sets her compass to a
personal north star: endeavoring to find herself. But with each step forward she is confronted
by a violence she doesn’t yet know how to counter in this exciting often terrifying world
each choice is truly a matter of life and death. With her first novel Alana S. Portero
strikingly underscores the ties between gender and class the search for identity and the
power of sisterhood and community. Gentle but blistering Bad Habit is a mesmerizing story of
self-realization that speaks to the outsider in all of us. Translated from the Spanish by
Mara Faye Lethem
