Cover

About the Book

Set 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 is eighteen and 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; the lies we tell in service of those things we cannot live without.

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.

Dedication

For Barbara Hewson-Bower

Epigraph

I think, if you have lived through a war or have made your home in a country not your own, or if you’ve learned to love one man, then your life is a story.

If you love a man who’s not your husband, your life becomes the story everyone else tells.

Anne Michaels

Writing is a questionable business.

W. G. Sebald

Faithless

Even in the summertime the sea here glistens a chill, leaden blue, the late afternoon shadows darkening the water. The gloaming, they call this hour. Though that is altogether too mild and warm a word for this slow leaching of light. It’s a golden word, something liquid and magical about it. Something fey and friendly. In Suffolk the sky is grey and close, the light salt-washed and cold. The sea today is flat, its surface barely marred by wind. No sign of what swells and moves beneath it. No pealing bells from Dunwich’s famous drowned churches. No sound at all but the quiet lapping of the waves against the shingle beach.