Faithless

Faithless is a remarkable story about love, literature, family, mortality and that which survives mortality, among other profound human experiences. All the more remarkable: it’s written in such vivid, luminous prose that I found myself reading ever more slowly, lest I fail to savour any of its countless brilliant lines. It’s a significant accomplishment.

Michael Cunningham

This is s novel of moral complexity centring on Cressida, a flawed but brilliantly drawn character. A brave and beautiful book which wears its literary heart on its sleeve.

Morgan Smith, Gleebooks, Dulwich Hill

Faithless is a meditation on devotion and concealment, not only the concealments of clandestine lovers, but larger evasions of history and inheritance. In the end one unexpected attachment holds firm and this story of faith and determination will charm and captivate readers.

Brenda Walker

You know that feeling you have when you read a line from a book and you instantly know that you will love this book forever? Like the author has somehow peered into your soul and immortalised every hidden thought and emotion on the page before you? That is how I felt as I was reading Faithless, underlining sentences and bookmarking pages I never wanted to forget. It is maddening how deeply I’ve fallen for this story. Faithless unveils how love exposes who we are most faithful to in life, who we are most faithless to, and the deceptions we spin to keep our faith from falling apart.

Aurelia Orr, Readings

A ferociously original and absorbing tale. Nelson’s prose is both poetic and poignant.

Leah Kaminsky

Alice Nelson’s Faithless is an astonishing novel that unfolds as a love letter from protagonist Cressida to her all-consuming love, Max. In the beginning, Cressida is looking after a young girl and we can’t be sure how they’re related; it seems they haven’t known each other long. While watching this young girl Cressida reflects on her life and the weighty decisions she has made that have led her to this point. Her life orbits around her love for Max, and it’s to the detriment of her own wellbeing because Max is a married man. Setting him aside, Cressida’s life is rich and full; she travels, she writes, she has a loving friend and an adoring husband, but she would give it all up in a second. Nelson is an incredibly talented writer, creating a narrative voice that speaks directly and personally to the reader. The novel is strewn with literary references, and Cressida often draws on her own reading and the words of others to describe emotions she can’t quite articulate herself. Nelson has a deep understanding of the paralysing nature of love, but also of the complexities that come with the business of living—intergenerational trauma, the choices of your parents, reckoning with a life you weren’t expecting, and knowing your heritage and those of the countries you’ve inhabited. Faithless is gentle, multi-layered and incredibly intelligent. It’s a book for readers who adored Georgia Blain’s Between a Wolf and a Dog, and for those who want to understand and be understood by others.

Danielle Bagnato, Books + Publishing

Faithless is a superb literary achievement that firmly places Nelson among Australia’s leading contemporary writers. The beauty of her language, the sophistication of her ideas, and her skilful interweaving of plot, character, and meaning set this book apart, and it deserves critical acclaim and to reach a wide audience.

Nicole Abadee, Australian Book Review

This is a tender and tough exploration of love, desire, writing, and parenting, travelling the atmospheric settings of France, India, and Sussex. When writer, Cressida, turns up in moody Sussex with a strange child under her wing, memories of her earlier love affair with a celebrated novelist, Max, threaten to submerge her in grief and longing. Unravelling the intricate ways she has been entwined with Max both passionately, and intellectually, forces a reckoning where she confronts faith and the many ways we can attend to those we love. Stunning!

Molly Murn, Matilda's Bookshop

Risking extravagance, I'm willing to suggest the intensity of Alice Nelson's third novel, Faithless, captures something of the tragic passion of Tolstoy's Anna Karenina. Faithless is a triumph, using a perfectly paced first-person narrative to unravel an obsessively complex love story with elegiac fluency.

Ian McFarlane, The Canberra Times

It’s about all different kinds of love and lies and not knowing what’s best for yourself or the people in your life.

Alexandra English, Harper's Bazaar

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. Nelson writes truly gorgeous prose, luminous and sensitive to the unspoken undercurrents of emotion that exist between people. Equally impressive, however, is the sophistication with which she interweaves ideas and narrative, employing plot and character to circle a core of thematic interests including the consolations and failures of language and literature, the workings of memory, the extent to which we can find a sense of home in both places and people, and the ways even those closest to us often remain essentially unknowable.

Gemma Nisbett, The West Australian

Unwrap layers of hearts loved and lost in this gem of a novel exploring passion, deception and the pursuit of happiness. Cressida is still a teen when she feels a rush of love and lust upon spying married man Max at her family estate in India. The relationshp mirrors that of Cressy's mother, also entrenched as the other woman with a part-time partner. With marriage to another man and attachment to a child forcing her to open her heart further, this story has so many facets, it's compelling and a sheer delight.

Carina Bruce, QWeekend

Simply divine. Set between England and India, Faithless is a powerful story of desire, love, lust and life.

Samuel Bernard, The Australian

A story of obsessive love ... [moving] assuredly between continents, time periods and moral conundrums.

Judges, The Age Book of the Year