He is also a very musical stylist – the book is full of long, beautifully counterweighted sentences and subtle cadences that change from voice to voice as different characters take up the narrative.

The writing is a delight Hill is an assiduous selector of words whose artistic concentration seldom lapses. Hill is an assiduous selector of words whose artistic concentration seldom lapses The word “Nix” refers to a malevolent life-haunting homunculus that deceives its victims into loving those that hurt them the most – and so furnishes the book with a metaphorical organising principle. The Nix is really a novel about growing up in the US, about the two childhoods of mother and son, about coming of age, awkward friendships and first loves, about the loneliness of intelligence, about loss and mishandled relationships. Thus Samuel’s investigation into the reasons for his own maternal rejection begin. But when he is faced with the cancellation of a pre-existing book contract and repaying the big advance, writing a quick and savage “tell all” about his mother seems the only way to avoid bankruptcy and save his literary career. At first he refuses to have anything to do with Faye. The video has gone viral and Samuel has been tracked down. She comes back into his life via the news networks as the “radical hippie prostitute teacher” who has been captured on a phone camera throwing gravel at a faux-folksy governor presumed to be running for president. With near-absurd brevity, therefore, let me say that this is the story of Samuel whose mother, Faye, abandoned him when he was a boy.

The Nix by Nathan Hill