Lisa de Nikolits announces her ambition on the first page of her fifth novel, name-checking Gibreel Farishta, one of the main characters in Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses. Following the loss of her “house to the bank and [her] job to the recession and [her] boyfriend to a nervous breakdown,” Nikolits’s proagonist, Joss, decides to go off the grid, eventually becoming embroiled with a gang of teenagers and their malevolent, charismatic leader. Her voyage brings her into confrontation with her sense of identity and relationship to the machinations of groupthink and organized religion.
Between the Cracks She Fell