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A moving, suspenseful, beautifully atmospheric novel about a young woman's affair with an Italian aristocrat that leaves her spiraling in the face of love, danger, and obsession. When Nora, an anxious and withdrawn American teenager, is sent to live with relatives in Turin, she meets Nicola, the enigmatic son of the most powerful aristocratic family in Italy. They forge a sudden, powerful connection in a chairlift several hundred feet above the Alps, where Nicola, brimming with old-world wealth and secrets, eases Nora back from the verge of a panic attack. In an instant, Nora forgets the feelings she's been harboring for her host sister since arriving in Italy, and a sharper, more reckless feeling takes hold: blind trust and insatiable desire for Nicola.
Years later in New York, when Nicola becomes enmeshed in a covert, high-stakes business venture at the company where Nora works, the two begin an affair. But Nora is unprepared for the consequences of their attraction, when unrelenting currents of obsession, control, and revenge intensify their passion and entangle her in a secret plot to overthrow Nicola's corrupt father. Soon, she must decide for herself what makes a person truly evil and what she's willing to excuse for a chance at total intimacy.
Utterly seductive, fiercely intelligent, and achingly beautiful,
The Absolutes is a revealing portrait of a relationship that is as intoxicating as it is disquieting. Molly Dektar has crafted a hypnotic, provocative, and profound study of desire.
About the author
Molly Dektar is also the author of The Ash Family. A graduate of Brooklyn College’s MFA program, she is the recipient of the Dakin Fellowship from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. Her fiction has been published in The Yale Review, n+1, Fence, Harvard Review, and The Sewanee Review. She lives in Queens.
Summary
"Read this. Right now." —Brandon Taylor
"Molly Dektar can write like hell. [The Absolutes] is simply ravishing." —Melissa Febos
For fans of Emma Cline and Garth Greenwell, an arresting, seductive novel about one woman’s headlong dive into a reckless affair that leaves her teetering on the edge of sanity.
“In truth, the idea of evil didn’t worry me at all. There were all these checks on it, of romance and restraint. In such a context, evil was intriguing.”
When Nora, a withdrawn American teenager, is sent to live with relatives in Turin, she meets Nicola, the enigmatic son of the most powerful aristocratic family in Italy.
Years later, the two reconnect in New York and begin a heated affair. Propelled by disorienting desire, Nora quickly becomes entangled in Nicola’s insular, menacing world of old-world luxury and family secrets. When she suspects she’s being used in a secret plot to overthrow his corrupt father, Nora willfully turns submissive to Nicola, pushing against the boundaries of her own moral limits until she finds herself spiraling on a path of self-destruction.
The Absolutes is searing, subversive examination of manipulation, obsession, and sexual desire. With unsparing intrigue and ferocity, Dektar proves herself to be one of the most ambitious writers working today.
