Unemployed—and unmoored by her father’s death—recent college graduate Penny Baker decides to fix up her dad’s childhood home in New Jersey. Instead, she finds it occupied by a group of friendly anarchist squatters who have renamed the property “Nicotine.” The Nicotine residents (united in defense of smokers’ rights) and the other squatters in the neighborhood provide a sense of community and purpose that Penny feels she’s desperately lacking, and she soon moves into a nearby residence, becoming enmeshed in their political fervor.

But the rest of her family has other plans—her mother and older half-brother would prefer to evict the squatters and gentrify the neighborhood. As the Baker family’s lives begin to converge around Nicotine, Penny grows ever bolder and more determined to protect it—and its residents, specifically Rob, the asexual man with whom she’s fallen irredeemably in love.

Nell Zink exquisitely captures the clash between idealism and pragmatism, between the have-nots and the want-mores, in a riotous yet insightful novel that brilliantly encapsulates our time.