A Literary Hub Best Book of Year • A Crime Reads Best Debut of the Year • A Newsweek 25 Best Fall Books • A Philadelphia Inquirer 10 Big Books for the Fall • An O Magazine.com LGBTQ Books That Are Changing the Literary Landscape • An Electric Lit Most Anticipated Debut • A Paperback Paris Best New LGBTQ+ Books To Read This Year Selection • A Passport Best Book of the Month
The Secret History meets Lie with Me in Micah Nemerever's compulsively readable debut novel—a feverishly taut Hitchcockian story about two college students, each with his own troubled past, whose escalating obsession with one another leads to an act of unspeakable violence.
When Paul enters university in early 1970s Pittsburgh, it’s with the hope of moving past the recent death of his father. Sensitive, insecure, and incomprehensible to his grieving family, Paul feels isolated and alone. When he meets the worldly Julian in his freshman ethics class, Paul is immediately drawn to his classmate’s effortless charm.
Paul sees Julian as his sole intellectual equal—an ally against the conventional world he finds so suffocating. Paul will stop at nothing to prove himself worthy of their friendship, because with Julian life is more invigorating than Paul could ever have imagined. But as charismatic as he can choose to be, Julian is also volatile and capriciously cruel, and Paul becomes increasingly afraid that he can never live up to what Julian expects of him.
As their friendship spirals into all-consuming intimacy, they each learn the lengths to which the other will go in order to stay together, their obsession ultimately hurtling them toward an act of irrevocable violence.
Unfolding with a propulsive ferocity, These Violent Delights is an exquisitely plotted excavation of the depths of human desire and the darkness it can bring forth in us.
© 2020 HarperAudio (Audiobook): 9780062963666
Release date
Audiobook: 15 September 2020
A Literary Hub Best Book of Year • A Crime Reads Best Debut of the Year • A Newsweek 25 Best Fall Books • A Philadelphia Inquirer 10 Big Books for the Fall • An O Magazine.com LGBTQ Books That Are Changing the Literary Landscape • An Electric Lit Most Anticipated Debut • A Paperback Paris Best New LGBTQ+ Books To Read This Year Selection • A Passport Best Book of the Month
The Secret History meets Lie with Me in Micah Nemerever's compulsively readable debut novel—a feverishly taut Hitchcockian story about two college students, each with his own troubled past, whose escalating obsession with one another leads to an act of unspeakable violence.
When Paul enters university in early 1970s Pittsburgh, it’s with the hope of moving past the recent death of his father. Sensitive, insecure, and incomprehensible to his grieving family, Paul feels isolated and alone. When he meets the worldly Julian in his freshman ethics class, Paul is immediately drawn to his classmate’s effortless charm.
Paul sees Julian as his sole intellectual equal—an ally against the conventional world he finds so suffocating. Paul will stop at nothing to prove himself worthy of their friendship, because with Julian life is more invigorating than Paul could ever have imagined. But as charismatic as he can choose to be, Julian is also volatile and capriciously cruel, and Paul becomes increasingly afraid that he can never live up to what Julian expects of him.
As their friendship spirals into all-consuming intimacy, they each learn the lengths to which the other will go in order to stay together, their obsession ultimately hurtling them toward an act of irrevocable violence.
Unfolding with a propulsive ferocity, These Violent Delights is an exquisitely plotted excavation of the depths of human desire and the darkness it can bring forth in us.
© 2020 HarperAudio (Audiobook): 9780062963666
Release date
Audiobook: 15 September 2020
Step into an infinite world of stories
Overall rating based on 179 ratings
Page-turner
Thought-provoking
Thrilling
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Deepan
11 Jun 2021
Micah is gifted. As a writer, words are power. Micah's words are not only power, they are blades, double edged ones. Inside this forest of blades, you walk through the love of Julian and Paul, the story of two intensely different students: one of the sophisticated rich while one of working class, one whose history oozed out cross cutting privileges while the other a product of years of burden of a painful history, who treated killing as a vaguely Darwinian intellectual exercise, blood not as gore, but as a medium of ecstatic transcendence.
D
21 Jan 2023
What a roller coaster this book was
Dhanya
5 Jun 2021
Just amazing.. having a book hangover now...
Anushka Reddy
14 Jun 2023
Okay, I HAVE MIXED EMOTIONS!!WHAT WAS THAT ENDING??? FRT, WHAT HAPPENED? TOOK MY DUMB BRAIN A TRIP TO REDDIT TO MAYBE DECIPHER IT. IDK, I STILL AM UNSURE WHAT IT EXACTLY ENTAILS. IS IT OPEN TO INTERPRETATION? IS IT ONLY COMPREHENSIBLE TO TRUE DARK ACADEMIA FANS?*deep breaths*This book, for some reason was dnf'd a while ago. I picked it up again from the beginning because I have heard so much about it and I also barely remembered a thing. For the first half of the book, I was just struggling to connect with the narrative. I sort of understood what was happening but I could not reason with myself to like it. I was just so disconnected. This continued on until the story took a drastic turnaround and I wanted to get to the end, ASAP.This is the poetic, obsessive, and inherently toxic tale of Paul and Julian, who would not flinch to go to the ends of the earth to show the depths of their love for each other. If only they knew what and when to say it.
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