Nicotine

One of Huffington Posts 20 Fall 2016 Books Youll Need for Your BookshelfFeatured in New York Magazines Fall 2016 PreviewAn Entertainment Weekly Fall 2016 Must-ReadFeatured in LitHubs 2016 Booksellers Fall PreviewFeatured in The Guardians Fall 2016 Books Preview: The Best American WritingFrom 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 fathers 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 shes never felt particularly close to her much-older half-brothers from Norms 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 shes desperately lacking, and the other squatter houses in the neighborhood provide a sense of community Pennys 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 familys 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.