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.