Published in 2023
336 pages
Molly Dektar is 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 or is forthcoming in The Yale Review, n+1, Fence, Harvard Review, and The Sewanee Review. She lives in Queens.
What is this book about?
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When Nora, an anxious and withdrawn American teenager, is sent to live with relatives in Turin, she meets Nicola, the enigmatic son of the most powerful aristocratic family in Italy.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.
