“I get tired of hearing people say indigenous people should practice their folkways,” rants Penny. The strongest echoes in Nicotine are of the latter: tricky family entanglements, and daring to go there when it comes to cultural difference. First there was Tiffany the eco-terrorist in The Wallcreeper, followed thereafter by the mother-daughter duo living incognito in Mislaid, a story of racial transgression that read like a Shakespearean comedy. Nicotine is Zink’s third book (fourth if you count Private Novelist, coming out in tandem in the US, a rather complicated metafictional project I don’t have enough space to explain, all I’ll say is if you’re a fan of her unique brand of zany, it’s worth getting hold of a copy), and it confirms her preoccupation with marginalised people living off-the-grid in one way or another. As one points out, any kind of drug abuse goes these days, “But smoke a cigarette, and you’re on everybody’s shit list.” When Penny goes to investigate she finds the house inhabited by a band of anarchist squatters (translation: “ineffectual live and let live pseudo-revolutionaries”) united in their addiction to the last taboo: tobacco. The family – Amalia (born into the Kogi tribe, found by Norm on a rubbish dump in Cartagena when she was 13 years old first he adopted her, later he married her), and Penny’s half-brothers Matt and Patrick (older than their stepmother) – decide she should move into Norm’s old childhood home in Jersey City. Maybe I am friends with somebody in your building?” “But Facebook maybe? I updated my status to single. I was too grieving,” her mother Amalia says when Penny calls to ask how the news has travelled so fast.

Returning to her rent-controlled Manhattan apartment (the lease of which is in Norm’s name) the day after he passes, Penny discovers she’s already been given notice.

It’s a Kafkaesque ordeal – “No painkillers because they hasten death, and no fluids because they prolong life” – told with excruciating, often uncomfortably visceral detail, but Nell Zink fashions some of her sharpest humour out of such tragedy. Penny is an unemployed business major whose first experience of the “real world” is to watch her father Norm die a slow death.

Private novelist by nell zink