Faithless

'Sometimes, Max, I imagine that I see you in her. Not in the sense of any physical inheritance, but a fleeting essence. Something wary and remote. Haunted, you might say. Though her ghosts are not yours.''Faithless is a triumph, using a perfectly paced first-person narrative to unravel an obsessively complex love story with elegiac fluency.'THE CANBERRA TIMES'With a good chunk of the year still remaining, is it too early to say that I've found my favourite book of 2022? After reading the third novel by West Australian author Alice Nelson, it's difficult to avoid the temptation towards superlatives.'THE WEST AUSTRALIAN'A superb literary achievement.'ABR'It is maddening how deeply I have fallen for this story.'READINGSSet between India and England, Faithless is the story of Cressida, a writer and translator, and her consuming love for Max, an enigmatic older writer - and married man.Cressida's passion for Max engulfs her from the first giddy rush of sensation when she meets him in the mountains of southern India. It is a desire so potent it delivers great stunning blows to her heart. And yet she can share it with almost no one.Then Cressida meets Leo, and she is forced to choose: between a life of passion or a desire for some peace of mind; between her romantic idealism and the possibility of a steadier, attainable happiness.As the years unfold with both these men, a fragile young child, Flora, also finds her way into Cressida's life and heart, and it is Flora who forces Cressida to confront her own capacity for love and deception, and to accept the compromises life forces on us.Faithless is a passionate love story and a profound reflection on the nuances of attachment, the nature of desire, the different connections and relationships that sustain us, and the ways that we deceive ourselves and others in the hope that, finally, we can reach stumblingly towards one another.