Nicotine: A Novel

One of Huffington Post’s 20 Fall 2016 Books You’ll Need for Your Bookshelf

Featured in New York Magazine’s Fall 2016 Preview

An Entertainment Weekly Fall 2016 Must-Read

Featured in LitHub’s 2016 Bookseller’s Fall Preview

Featured in The Guardian‘s Fall 2016 Books Preview: The Best American Writing

From the “wonderfully talented” (Dwight Garner, New York Times) author of Mislaid and The Wallcreeper comes a fierce and audaciously funny new novel, dazzling in its energy and ambition: a story of obsession, idealism, and ownership, centered around a young woman who inherits her bohemian father’s childhood home.

 Recent business school graduate Penny Baker has rebelled against her family her whole life-by being the conventional one. Her mother, Amalia, was a member of an Amazonian tribe called the Kogi; her much older father, Norm, long ago attained cult-like deity status among a certain group of aging hippies while operating a ‘healing center’ in New Jersey. And she’s never felt particularly close to her much-older half-brothers from Norm’s previous marriage-one wickedly charming and obscenely rich (but mostly just wicked), one a photographer on a distant tropical island.

 But all that changes when her father dies, and Penny inherits his childhood home in New Jersey. She goes to investigate the property and finds it not overgrown and abandoned, but rather occupied by a group of friendly anarchist squatters whom she finds unexpectedly charming, and who have renamed the property Nicotine House. The residents of Nicotine House (defenders of smokers’ rights) possess the type of passion and fervor Penny feels she’s desperately lacking, and the other squatter houses in the neighborhood provide a sense of community Penny’s never felt before, and she soon moves into a nearby residence, becoming enmeshed in the political fervor and commitment of her fellow squatters.

 As the Baker family’s lives begin to converge around the fate of the Nicotine House, Penny grows ever bolder and more desperate to protect it-and its residents-until a fateful night when a reckless confrontation between her old family and her new one changes everything.

A fierce and audaciously funny new novel from the author of Mislaid and The Wallcreeper.

Unemployed—and unmoored by her father’s death—recent college graduate Penny Baker decides to fix up her dad’s childhood home in New Jersey. Instead, she finds it occupied by a group of friendly anarchist squatters who have renamed the property “Nicotine.” The Nicotine residents (united in defense of smokers’ rights) and the other squatters in the neighborhood provide a sense of community and purpose that Penny feels she’s desperately lacking, and she soon moves into a nearby residence, becoming enmeshed in their political fervor.

But the rest of her family has other plans—her mother and older half-brother would prefer to evict the squatters and gentrify the neighborhood. As the Baker family’s lives begin to converge around Nicotine, Penny grows ever bolder and more determined to protect it—and its residents, specifically Rob, the asexual man with whom she’s fallen irredeemably in love.

Nell Zink exquisitely captures the clash between idealism and pragmatism, between the have-nots and the want-mores, in a riotous yet insightful novel that brilliantly encapsulates our time.

“Mislaid is a sprawling multi-generational saga of a Southern family that is as absurd and hilarious as it is tragic and seeing.” - VanityFair.com

“Nicotine’s greatest strength is the warmth with which it treats its characters. Even when Zink is being conventional, she’s exemplary. What makes her satire so exciting and so novel is the empathy of her writing... Zink’s prose is energetic and zingy... exciting and provocative...She’s a singular figure in the literary landscape, and Nicotine is a perfect introduction to her brilliant, off-kilter world.”

“Not a drop of acid mars the surface of this deadpan satire as it darts along, mocking and skewering the racist, homophobic and generally dingbat ideals of its characters…Zink’s humor is rarely predictable. . . . Mislaid feels like a subversive minstrel show sprung from an encyclopedic mind drunk on the Mad Hatter’s tea.” - Washington Post

“Profoundly irreverent and proudly cerebral, Zink peppers her narration with references to Herman Hesse, James Joyce and W.E.B. Du Bois and keeps the pace ticking. . . . Mislaid shows a uniquely zany worldview.” - Los Angeles Times

“A high comedy of racial identity: The Human Stain, backward, by David Sedaris. That makes the book a rarity on at least two fronts, because the shortage of smart new novels about race has nothing on the shortage of genuinely funny literary fiction. But Zink is a comic writer par excellence, one whose particular gift is the capacity to keep a perfectly straight face. Both that voice and the stories Zink tells are so startling, so seemingly without antecedent, that she would seem like an outsider artist, if she did not betray so much casual erudition.” - The New Yorker

“She’s a deadpan comedian, her sentences funny yet plump with existential dread...You’re never tempted to put Ms. Zink’s novels aside. They contain so much backspin and topspin that you’re kept alert by the leaping motion... Her books are sexy... I could listen to Ms. Zink’s dialogue all day.” - Dwight Garner, New York Times

“[A] wild and nervy novel. Zink is a master of rapid character development, shifting perspectives, sex scenes and plot twists. … “Nicotine” was so addictive it made me want to reach for a cigarette when I was done.” - Los Angeles Times

“Zink has instantly become one of the most unusual, refreshing voices in contemporary fiction. Her work is completely unfettered by genteel literary conventions and replete with robust storytelling...Both a satire of and a valentine to the 21st-century counterculture, Nicotine is sexy and political and hilarious.” - Slate

“Extraordinary... Get the book for its crackling prose and razor-sharp wit, but ready yourself for its blitzkrieg of startling imagery.” - Village Voice

“Undeniably excellent... Propulsive... This is Zink at her most heartfelt... Zink is an architect. She builds worlds that look a little like ours, but are wrong enough to make one think—really think, not just feel. ” - New Republic

“Smart and often very funny... Even while Zink skewers bohemian stereotypes — the affluent squatter, the chain-smoking environmentalist — she cares for her characters, imbuing them with complicated personalities, causes and sexual proclivities. Rich sensory detail, earnest dialogue and raw emotion...Absorbing, original... Belongs on your fall list.” - Chicago Tribune

“Zink has a sharp knack for illuminating the challenges facing American millennials circa now... [In Nicotine] you’ll find the cutting social commentary and sharply drawn characters of one of this decade’s most promising new novelists.” - Minneapolis Star Tribune

“Intellectually restless, uniquely funny...Propulsive, wonderfully stuffed with irreverent and absorbing banter...What’s most bootylicious in this novel is Zink’s warmhearted embrace of her subjects...One enjoys every minute with these obliging kooks....There may be some readers who want to make out with this book.” - New York Times Book Review

“Nicotine’s greatest strength is the warmth with which it treats its characters. Even when Zink is being conventional, she’s exemplary. What makes her satire so exciting and so novel is the empathy of her writing: She really loves her characters, even when she laughs at them. She grasps how millennial activists — and baby boomer activists, and millennial entrepreneurs — think and act and speak, and when she mocks them, it’s not with condescension but with affection... Zink’s prose is energetic and zingy... exciting and provocative... She’s a singular figure in the literary landscape, and Nicotine is a perfect introduction to her brilliant, off-kilter world.” - Vox

“Even when Zink is being conventional, she’s exemplary. What makes her satire so exciting and so novel is the empathy of her writing... Exciting and provocative... She’s a singular figure in the literary landscape, and Nicotine is a perfect introduction to her brilliant, off-kilter world.” - Vox

“The author’s best work... Zink is a wordsmith’s wordsmith. She’s sharp, wry, and might be a genius.” - The Millions

“A hilarious perversion of the rom-com…Ms. Zink’s 2015 novel Mislaid delightfully sent up racial and gender mores, and here again she has affectionate fun tweaking the pieties of her cast of businessmen, cultists and activists. …Nicotine is light reading in the best sense. Think Wodehouse for millennials.” - Wall Street Journal

“Zink writes some of the most comical lust between “love weasels” in contemporary fiction…[She] excels at scathing set pieces that caustically sum up places and local cultures…Zink’s novels have a loose, jumpy energy and depend on machine-gun-fire dialogue. She gets her characters in motion, like mismatched roommates in a ramshackle house, and lets us enjoy watching them pinball around.” - Washington Post

“Zink writes some of the most comical lust between “love weasels” in contemporary fiction…[She] excels at scathing set pieces that caustically sum up places and local cultures…She gets her characters in motion, like mismatched roommates in a ramshackle house, and lets us enjoy watching them pinball around.” - Washington Post