Parts per Million

Three mismatched roommates rescue a drug addict with an expired passport in this fast-paced activist novel set in 2002 in Portland, Oregon. Parts per Million is political. It''s personal. It''s reading for the resistance--and it''s a powerful exploration of how an unlikely band of heroes subverts the status quo.
"Parts Per Million is an ambitious first book: it’s a thriller and a novel about a friendship in peril and it’s a critique of protest culture and it’s a love letter to those who are willing to earnestly fight for what they believe, even when it seems that everyone else has given up." -Paul Constant, The Seattle Review of Books

When John Nelson abandoned his government job to join a scrappy band of activists, he didn’t realize trying to save the world would be so hard. His ideals remain strong, but his optimism is wearing thin. His fellow activists—computer hacker Jen Owens and Vietnam vet Irving Fetzer—still think he’s a square. And their radio show can’t compete with the corporate media.
Parts per Million, Julia Stoops’s socially conscious, fast-paced debut novel, is set in Portland, Oregon, in 2002. As the trio dives into anti-war protests and investigates fraud at an elite university, Nelson falls in love with an unlikely houseguest, Deirdre, a photographer from Ireland—and a recovering addict. Fetzer recognizes her condition but keeps it secret, setting off a page-turning chain of events that threatens to destroy the activists’ friendship even as they’re trying to hold the world together, one radio show at a time.