Nicotine LP

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.