Penguin Random House SA and Love Books invite you to the launch of The Nicotine Gospel, the highly anticipated new novel by Sven Axelrad!

In The Nicotine Gospel, two brothers reconnect on a road trip after their father’s death, and are forced to reckon with the past, their grief and the beliefs that shaped them.

Axelrad was born in New Zealand to a French-speaking British father and a South African mother, and lives in Durban. He is an accountant who reads 65 books a year, plays the guitar and is covered in tattoos.

Axelrad will be in conversation with Mila de Villiers at the event.

Event details

Date: Thursday 22 May 2025
Time: 17:30 for 18:00
Venue: Love Books, 53 Rustenburg Road, Melville, Joburg
RSVP: Love Books website or 011 726 7408

About the book

My dad believed that you could tell everything worth knowing about a person by what cigarettes they smoked. He taught this to my brother and me when we were only kids. That’s how all of this starts – in 1987, with a bolt of lightning and a pack of Lucky Strikes.

On New Year’s Eve in 1987, lightning kills Nate’s and Danny’s mother. To deal with the loss and make sense of a world seemingly governed by chance, their distant and eccentric father creates the Nicotine Gospel. ‘According to him, an eight by five cardboard box containing somewhere near twenty machine-made cigarettes would tell you all you needed to know about a man.’

The boys throw themselves into the lessons to be close to their dad, but as Nate grows up and begins to understand how strange the family gospel (and their father) truly is, he starts to worry. While Nate excels at school and finds ways to escape their father’s neglect and the increasingly ramshackle house in Durban, Danny seems to revel in courting danger and death.

Decades later, upon learning of their father’s death, Nate and Danny, long estranged, decide to drive from Durban to Cape Town to attend the funeral. On the journey, they must confront each other and their troubled past to find a way forward.

The Nicotine Gospel is a darkly funny road trip novel.

Categories Fiction South Africa

Tags Book events Book launches Love Books Penguin Random House SA Sven Axelrad The Nicotine Gospel