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.