The Nix: Nathan Hill - Softcover

Hill, Nathan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1509807853 ISBN 13: 9781509807857

Publisher: Picador, 2017

Synopsis

'The best new writer of fiction in America. The best.' - John Irving

Nathan Hill's brilliant debut takes the reader from the rural Midwest of the 1960s, to New York City during Occupy Wall Street; from Chicago in 1968, to wartime Norway: home of the mysterious Nix.

Meet Samuel: stalled writer, bored teacher at a local college, obsessive player of online video games. He hasn't seen his mother, Faye, in decades, not since she abandoned her family when he was a boy. Now she has suddenly reappeared, having committed an absurd politically motivated crime that electrifies the nightly news, beguiles the Internet, and inflames a divided America. The media paints Faye as a radical hippie with a sordid past, but as far as Samuel knows, his mother was an ordinary girl who married her high-school sweetheart. Which version of his mother is true? Two facts are certain: she's facing some serious charges, and she needs Samuel's help.

As Samuel begins to excavate his mother's, and his country's, history, he will unexpectedly find that he has to rethink everything he ever knew about her - a woman with an epic story of her own, a story she has kept hidden from the world.

About this title

Review

Impressive that a debutant, Nathan Hill, with his scintillating The Nix has given us a character who comes close to out-Trumping Trump . . . Just one of the many pleasures of this engaging story of a mother and son whose private travails become front-page news. Author: New Year Highlights Source: Observer

Alarmingly good . . . both a Great American Novel as well as a great American novel... aches with all-new relevance. Source: Guardian

A superb debut novel . . . could well be the most ambitious novel of the year... It seems like Hill is a writer who can do pretty much what he wants. Source: Daily Telegraph

Compulsive and crazily entertaining Author: Anthony Quinn Source: Observer

We're in the presence of a major new comic novelist . . . a brilliant, endearing writer . . . Readers . . . will be dazzled. Source: Washington Post

The best new writer of fiction in America. The best. Author: John Irving

I got a big kick out of Nathan Hill's impressive first novel, The Nix (Picador), out in the UK next year. Hill's zeitgeisty portrayals of video game addiction and customer-oriented university education are brilliant. Author: Lionel Shriver, 'Books of the Year 2016' Source: Observer

Wonderful. Everything that doesn't involve reading this book is a nuisance and a distraction. Author: Sarah Jessica Parker

Hill has so much talent to burn that he can pull off just about any style, imagine himself into any person and convincingly portray any place or time. The Nix is hugely entertaining and unfailingly smart, and the author seems incapable of writing a pedestrian sentence or spinning a boring story Source: New York Times Book Review

There is an accidental topicality in Hill's debut, about an estranged mother and son whose fates hinge on two mirror-image political events - the Democratic Convention of 1968 and the Republican Convention of 2004. But beyond that hook lies a high-risk, high-reward playfulness with structure and tone: comic set pieces, digressions into myth, and formal larks that call to mind Jennifer Egan's A Visit From the Goon Squad. Source: New York Magazine

Book Description

The instant New York Times No. 5 bestseller, a gloriously ambitious, witty and deeply touching debut novel of fifty years of America and of American radical protest, the story of a son, the mother who left him as a child, and how his search to uncover the secrets of her life leads him to reclaim his own.

About this edition

• Publisher: Picador
• Publication date: 2017
• ISBN 10: 1509807853
• ISBN 13: 9781509807857
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 640