A child grows up in a Florida swampland settlement shaped by conspiracy thinking, ecological paranoia, and the soft delusion of American self-invention.

In Avalon, Nell Zink builds a coming-of-age story that drifts between satire and sincerity — feral childhood, cult-adjacent communities, environmental obsession, and the uneasy inheritance of belief. Zink writes with that strange clarity she’s known for: sentences that look casual but are structurally precise, funny until they’re not.

It’s less a novel about plot than about atmosphere — about what happens when ideology seeps into domestic life and no one quite names it.

For readers of off-centre literary fiction that doesn’t perform its seriousness.