The wonderfully talented author of Mislaid returns with a fierce and audaciously funny novel of families-both the ones we’re born into and the ones we create-a story of obsession, idealism, and ownership, centered around a young woman who inherits her bohemian late father’s childhood home

NICOTINE
by Nell Zink
Ecco, June 2015

Penny Baker has rebelled against her family her whole life-by being the conventional one. Her mother, Amalia, was a member of a South American tribe called the Kogi; her much older father, Norm, long ago attained cult-like deity status among a certain cohort of aging hippies while operating a psychedelic “healing center.” 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.” In NICOTINE, Nell Zink exquisitely captures the clash between Baby-Boomer idealism and Millennial pragmatism, between the have-nots and want-mores, in a riotous yet tender novel that brilliantly encapsulates our time.

Nell Zink is the author of the internationally sold “Mislaid” and “Wallcreeper”.