Author(s): Alice Nelson

Fiction | Staff Picks

A passionate love story and an honest depiction of the deceptions woven to sustain the idea of connection. Set between England and India, Faithless tells the story of Cressida, a writer and translator, and her consuming love for Max, an enigmatic older writer - and a married man. Faithless charts the course of Cressida's passion for Max from the first giddy rush of sensation when she meets him during her first year at Cambridge, to the blossoming of a desire so potent it overwhelms her, and the great stunning blows to the heart delivered by this love she must keep hidden. When Cressida meets Leo, she is forced to confront the tension between a life of passion and a desire for ease, between her romantic idealism and the possibility of a more steady, attainable happiness. Alongside the story of Cressida and Max, is the tale of Flora, a child who finds her way into Cressida's life and heart, and forces her to confront her own capacity for love, and for deception. Faithless is both a passionate love story and a reflection on the nuances of attachment, the nature of desire, the different kinds of connections and relationships that sustain us, and the ways that we deceive ourselves and others and, finally, reach stumblingly toward one another.