"Wonderful! Leah and Helen are authentic, vulnerable characters, whose intimate truths are exposed at perfect, unexpected moments."―Elizabeth Strout

A jolting, sensual novel in stories that traces the crises, cruelties and passions of girls and mothers in the chaos of 1970s Greenwich Village, now in a deluxe edition featuring a reader's guide and a new, previously unpublished story.

1970s Greenwich Village: Leah Levinson can't help worshipping the girls who torment her at school. Her perilous, magnetic friendships with Rainey Royal and Angeline Yost-girls she fears yet cannot resist-leave her desperate to shift the balance of power and affection. Meanwhile, Leah's emotionally estranged mother, Helen, secretly rents a room uptown where she lives out a second life. And Rainey-whose chaotic upbringing fills her with artistic inspiration and dread-decides to risk everything on an act of vengeance in a legendary artists' building. As we move between points of view, the New York of another era blazes with danger, beauty, and possibility.

First published in 2009 and now expanded with a new story, Normal People Don't Live Like This is a luminous depiction of the crises, cruelties, and passions of girls and mothers, and the first book in the Rainey Royal Cycle. It is joined by a new novel in stories, List of All Possible Desires, and a deluxe reissue of the 2014 novel Rainey Royal. Each book can be read on its own, but together they echo and amplify one another, creating a world of almost unbearable richness and intensity.