High Maintenance

The author of the outrageous, hilarious Going Down—named Best New Novelist by Entertainment Weekly—returns with her second novel: the story of an obsessive love affair between a woman and an apartment.

The publication of her sexy, offbeat, riotous first novel, Going Down, won Jennifer Belle raves from Time ("an exceptionally funny writer") to Entertainment Weekly ("a wonderful, aberrant, compulsively readable novel"). Going Down was sold around the world, film rights were optioned by Madonna, and Belle was compared to everyone from Dorothy Parker and Lorrie Moore to J. D. Salinger and Liz Phair. What it all added up to was the arrival of a vivid, inimitable comic voice.

High Maintenance is another brilliantly twisted New York story that is as funny, sad, painful, ridiculous, wild, daring, and lovable as its predecessor. Set in the manic world of New York real estate, it tells the story of Liv Kellerman, a young woman who's just left her husband and, more important, their fabulous penthouse apartment with its Empire State Building view. On her own for the first time in her life, she relocates to a crumbling Greenwich Village hovel and contemplates her next move. Before long she finds her true calling: selling real estate. With her native eye for prime properties and an ability to lie with a straight face, Liv finds success and soon is swimming with the sharks—the hardcore, cutthroat brokers who'll do anything to close a deal. Along the way she picks up a maniacally ardent architect who likes to bite her, a few hilarious bosses, strange and exasperating clients, and a gun, and brings them with her on her search for the one thing she's really after—a home.

Belle's gift for creating strange and winning characters and her acute observations of both the absurd and the poignant in everyday life are the hallmarks of her fiction. High Maintenance is generous and unsparing, tough and exciting and terrifically smart—a hot new property on the market.