The Nix cover art

The Nix

From 1960s Chicago to wartime Norway, an epic family saga of mystery and secrets in a divided America

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The Nix

Written by: Nathan Hill
Narrated by: Ari Fliakos
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About this listen

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

Nathan Hill's brilliant debut, The Nix, journeys 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.

 Action & Adventure Dark Humour Genre Fiction Historical Literary Fiction Literature & Fiction Political

Critic Reviews

Alarmingly good . . . both a Great American Novel as well as a great American novel... aches with all-new relevance.
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.
Compulsive and crazily entertaining (Anthony Quinn)
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)
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)
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.
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')
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
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.
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. (National Public Radio)
Nathan Hill Is Compared to John Irving. Irving Compares Him to Dickens.
This is a book to get one excited not only about Hill and his future as a novelist, but also about the power of writing to blot out background-noise banality and vault us forward into the new and wondrous.
Hill skillfully blends humor and darkness, imagery and observation. He also excels at describing technology, addition, cultural milestones, and childhood ordeals. Cameos by [the famous] add heart and perspective to this rich, lively take on American social conflict, real and invented, over the last half-century.
This guy has chops (Jay McInerney)
All stars
Most relevant
The Nix was a wonderful piece of fiction. The book starts off on lighter notes with many elements of humour before slowly delving into the main plot. Character descriptions are rich, and their stories are wonderful. Ari Fliakos does a spectacular job at the narration.

Wonderful book, very well written

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This is the first 15 hours book I've listened to and I had a lot of fun.

that was an enjoyable story

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