A New York Times Notable Book
Entertainment Weekly’s #1 Book of the Year
Audible’s #1 Audiobook of the Year
A Washington Post Notable Book
A Slate Top Ten Book
Published worldwide in more than two dozen languages

“Nathan Hill is a maestro…The best new writer of fiction in America.”
—John Irving 

“A major new comic novelist.”
—The Washington Post

“Hugely entertaining and unfailingly smart.”
—New York Times Book Review

It’s 2011, and Samuel Andresen-Anderson hasn’t seen his mother, Faye, in decades—not since she abandoned the family when he was a boy. Now she’s reappeared, having committed an absurd crime that electrifies the nightly news and inflames a politically divided country. 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.

To save her, Samuel will have to embark on his own journey, uncovering long-buried secrets about the woman he thought he knew, secrets that stretch across generations and have their origin all the way back in Norway, home of the mysterious Nix. As he does so, Samuel will confront not only Faye’s losses but also his own lost love, and will relearn everything he thought he knew about his mother, and himself.

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Praise for The Nix

“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.”
—The New York Times Book Review

“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.…Nathan Hill? He’s gonna be famous. This is just the start.”
—NPR

“Reading The Nix was an experience of complete unadulterated pleasure.”
—The Independent

“This looks to be the debut of an important new writer, able to variously make readers laugh out loud while providing a melancholy, resonant tale.”
—USA Today

“Not since the 1996 and 1997 double-header of John Updike’s In the Beauty of the Lilies and Philip Roth’s American Pastoral has a novel emerged that presents a more comprehensive and perceptive portrait of the personal and political American psyche than Nathan Hill’s wise, rueful, and scathingly funny début.”
—Barnes & Noble

“What pushes this novel into Great American Novel territory may be its rare audacity in insisting that even amidst all of the anxieties of contemporary times…we remain capable of righting the wrongs of the past, if we have the courage to rediscover one another.”
—National Book Critics Circle

“The Nix is a mother-son psychodrama with ghosts and politics, but it’s also a tragicomedy about anger and sanctimony in America. Even the minor characters go to extremes—among them, a Home Ec teacher from Hell and an unrepentant plagiarist with presidential aspirations. ‘A maestro of being awful,’ the son calls his mom. ‘Every memory is really a scar,’ she tells him. For this mother and son, disappointment is ‘the price of hope’—a cost they will both bear. Nathan Hill is a maestro of being terrific.”
—John Irving, author of 14 novels, including The World According to Garp, The Cider House Rules, and Avenue of Mysteries

“Nathan Hill’s The Nix is a huge, intimate, funny, beautifully intelligent novel — one of those books that almost seems to be alive:  you open it up and are pulled within, and you live in the heartbeat of its pages, day after day.  This is a lovely, smart, surprising read.”
—Julie Schumacher, author of Dear Committee Members, winner of the Thurber Prize for American Humor

“Pay attention. This is what a Great American Novel looks like. The Nix is culturally relevant, politically charged, historically sweeping, sad, full of yearning, sometimes dark but mostly hilarious. Nathan Hill is a literary powerhouse who will deservedly earn many comparisons to John Irving and Jonathan Franzen.”
—Benjamin Percy, author of The Dead Lands, Red Moon, The Wilding and Refresh, Refresh

“Ix-nay all plans and grab a copy of The Nix! Nathan Hill’s novel is smart, inventive, and fun, as you might expect of a book that features a slew of elves and the 1968 Democratic Convention. I will read it again; I will keep it on my shelf of favorites, feed it sugar water, and hope it miraculously grows longer. Do you understand? The Nix is dead serious and delightful.”
—Sara Levine, author of Treasure Island!!! and The Hitch

“Once in a while a novel arrives at the perfect moment to reflect, skewer, and provide context for the world as we know it. This—now—is that novel. A satirical, fast-paced romp through time and space, The Nix is ambitious, wide-ranging, and full of surprises. It gathers force and momentum as it speeds toward the end, where all of its pieces fit together as precisely as a puzzle.”
—Christina Baker Kline, author of Orphan Train