The Nix

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.

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.

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

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.

New York Times

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.

San Francisco Chronicle

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.

Publishers' Weekly, starred and boxed review

This guy has chops

Jay McInerney

A great sprawling feast of a first novel . . . both darkly satirical and uproariously funny . . . Hill writes with an astonishingly sure hand for a young author . . . Let's just call him the real thing.

Newsday

Dazzling . . . rich and multilayered . . . the debut of an important new writer, able to variously make readers laugh out loud while providing a melancholy, resonant tale that argues "there is no greater ache than this: guilt and regret in equal measure."

USA Today

The Nix is a timely mass-media and political satire, a family saga and two bildungsromans rolled into one ? and, in each facet, Nathan Hill crafts a hilarious, observant, unputdownable tale.

Huffington Post

By turns, wickedly funny, shockingly wise, touching and thought-provoking . . . a rich buffet of a novel.

Toronto Star

A fantastic novel about love, betrayal, politics and pop culture - as good as the best Michael Chabon or Jonathan Franzen.

People

A stunning debut . . . the first book I’ve read in two decades that earns the title Great American Novel.

New York Times

Not only dramatising America’s great tussle between minority interests and Midwestern grievances, [The Nix] even features a rogue presidential candidate who talks about immigrants as though they are coyotes damaging crops . . . But it’s the human drama of a relationship between a son and his mother (too busy protesting in the Sixties to bring him up) that will keep you hooked while you think.

GQ

This self-assured, sprawling debut is about the relationship between a college professor and his mother. It's a dense, satirical piece of fiction which offers commentary on the American history and modern technology. This novel is more relevant than ever in these tech-crazed times of mass media and political turmoil. With J.J. Abrams adapting it for a miniseries starring none other than Meryl Streep, The Nix is definitely one of the highlights of 2017

Wales Arts Review

[A] rich, absorbing saga that [is] so complex and brilliant [it] will stay with you long after you've turned the last page.

Stylist