Review Alarmingly good . . . both a Great American Novel as well as a great American novel... aches with all-new relevance. (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. (Daily Telegraph)Compulsive and crazily entertaining (Anthony Quinn Observer)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. (New Year Highlights Observer)The best thing a reviewer can do when faced with a novel of this calibre and breadth is to urge you to read it for yourselves – especially if your taste is for deeply engaged and engaging contemporary American prose fiction of real quality and verve. (Ed Docx Guardian)The best new writer of fiction in America. The best. (John Irving)We're in the presence of a major new comic novelist . . . a brilliant, endearing writer . . . Readers . . . will be dazzled. (Washington Post)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. (Lionel Shriver, 'Books of the Year 2016' Observer)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 (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. (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. From the Inside Flap 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. Meet Samuel Andresen-Anderson: 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 country. The media paints Faye as a radical hippy with a sordid past, but as far as Samuel knows, his mother was an ordinary girl who married her high-school sweetheart. Which version is true? Two things 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, the story moves from the rural Midwest of the 1960s to New York City during the Great Recession and the Occupy Wall Street movement, and back to the infamous riots at the 1968 Chicago Democratic National Convention. Finally, the trail leads him to wartime Norway, home of the mysterious Nix that his mother told him about as a child, a spirit that can take the shape of a white horse, luring children to their deaths. And in these places, Samuel will unexpectedly find that he has to rethink everything he ever knew about his mother - a woman with an epic story of her own, a story she has kept hidden from the world. From the Back Cover 'It broke my heart, this book. Time after time. It made me laugh just as often. I loved it on the first page as powerfully as I did on the last, and I think I was right, right from the start. Because Nathan Hill? He's gonna be famous. This is just the start.' US National Public Radio'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.' New York Times Book Review 'We're in the presence of a major new comic novelist . . . What a brilliant, endearing writer Hill is . . . Readers will be dazzled.' Washington Post'A great sprawling feast of a first novel . . . Hill writes with an astonishingly sure hand . . . Let's just call him the real thing.' Newsday'So spot-on it's frightening . . . That it's so entertaining, so full of energy, and packed with social and political observations that adroitly destabilize our comfortable assumptions about modern life is a triumph.' Huffington Post About the Author Nathan Hill was born in Iowa in 1975 and lives with his wife in Naples, Florida. The Nix is his first novel.
D**L
The book is set in 2011 and holds that year up as a mirror to 1968 where the age of hippies and free love resulted in America voting for Nixon
This turned out to be exactly what I was hoping for. A giant readable chunk of literary fiction. Plenty to get my teeth into but accessible enough to read in a day. If I had a quibble it would be about the way child abuse seems to recur as a plot point in these kinds of things and the unrelenting whiteness of the cast in a story set largely during Obama's Presidency.The book is set in 2011 and holds that year up as a mirror to 1968 where the age of hippies and free love resulted in America voting for Nixon. The author can't have known that the key point of comparison was really 2015 where the middle-America backlash against the Occupy Wall Street gave birth to the Trump campaign. A prescient read even if it smudges some of the details.
R**E
The book really has lots of good reviews, but I struggled and didn’t have the ...
I’m going to keep this short. The book really has lots of good reviews, but I struggled and didn’t have the patience to continue which is unusual for me
F**R
Over long but worth the effort
This book was much too long, and could have done with losing some of the sub-plots (eg the computer gaming habit). But the switching between the present and the past worked well. I am of the same generation as the mother and this book has captured both the excitement and the awfulness, particularly the treatment of women, of the late 1960s very well (and most younger writers fail to do this). It is not quite a great novel, but is a serious contender, and I look forward to reading Nathan Hill again.
M**R
Tedious ..
It's a long book, over 700 pages so I did expect perhaps a bit more detail than you get in shorter novels. I gave up after 100 pages as the actual story and enough background information could have been put into 50 pages. Life's too short!
N**I
Good for two thirds of the journey through it.
I was drawn in by the hype and to some extent, the hype was right. The writing is fresh and interesting and the characters are well drawn. But how a first book escaped the editor’s scimitar is beyond me. This book is over six hundred pages long and would have been better if it had been slashed down to four hundred.
L**S
Outstanding first novel
Epic, vast, thoughtful and thought provoking.Nathan Hill has created such a wonderful multi stranded tale set in the Chicago riots of 1968, the present day U.S. and gaming worlds, and with ethos of Norwegian folk stories.He weaves all of this together with excellent writing, pace and honesty.
T**L
Too overblown to be great
For a debut novelist setting out to write the Great American Novel, discipline is the foremost requirement. There's just too much here to accommodate. The structure alienates, the style is too varied. The reader is taken on a roller-coaster ride through forty years over sentences of 5,000 words and dozens of chapters of a page and a half. Finally the message rings feebly through: every bad is a potential good and having endured it all we'll be the better for it.
M**T
A great read
This book sprawls a timespan of 40 or so years as the main character, Samuel Andresen-Anderson goes on a voyage of discovery about his mother, grandfather and himself. This book is packed full of interesting and amusing characters, and the writing is wordy but enchanting. At over 700 pages long, it’s a commitment but well worth it.
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