About This Book
When Samuel's long-absent mother resurfaces on the evening news — caught throwing rocks at a presidential candidate — he's forced to reckon with a woman he barely knows and a past she's spent decades burying. The Nix is a sprawling American novel about what we owe our parents, what they owe us, and how the stories we tell about people we love are almost never the whole truth. It moves between the political upheaval of 1968 Chicago and the anxious, internet-saturated present of 2011, asking whether a country — or a family — can ever really understand itself.
Nathan Hill writes with the controlled chaos of someone who has read everything and synthesized it into something distinctly his own. The novel shifts registers with confidence: satirical and sharp in one chapter, quietly devastating in the next. At 625 pages it earns its length, layering storylines that seem tangential until they converge with real emotional weight. The prose is propulsive without sacrificing depth, and Hill's portrait of American self-delusion — personal and political — lingers well after the final page.