These Violent Delights: A Novel Paperback – 29 Sept. 2021

This book! This book! It's in my top five, which is a very difficult place to reach.The writing is first class. The story is dark but very human and real. Anyone that was ever a teenager can relate.The Jewish rep is outstanding. To see Jewish characters represented without that being the subject of the book was great. The use of Jewish concepts and Hebrew words was very clever... Never explaining too much, but enough that anyone with Google can satisfy their curiosity.It made me want to love, and to hate. This book must be read. When people say it's a cross between Call Me By Your Name and The Secret History, on a simple level that is because it's the perfect blend of obsession and young-adulthood, but it's also the quality of the writing.Outstanding as a first novel. Outstanding if it was his 100th novel. Michah I'm in awe.

I very much enjoyed this novel, I was never bored reading it and the plot was very exciting. My only qualm with it is that I struggled to engage with how much rage the main character was feeling. He felt a lot of rage about things I couldn’t imagine feeling rage about. Anger maybe but there was a lot of rage and fury for things I would consider maybe annoying. However I suppose that is more of a description of the kind of person we are getting to know throughout this novel. Overall I did enjoy it and will be recommending to a friend, if a sequel comes out (and I hope it does) I will be reading it

A twisted and surreal tale about two boys and the things they'd do for love.It's often confusing and, at times, disturbing the lengths the two main characters go to throughout this book to prove themselves to one another.Unfortunately for me, the prose was a little too 'purple' in places, but overall, I did enjoy this book. (Although admittedly, I didn't understand half of what was going on)Rating rounded up to 3.5stars

This book absolutely consumed me for the few days it took to read. Had I no other commitments I would have done nothing else until I finished it. The writing style is beautiful and compulsive author has captured so well the obsessive, destructive love between the two main characters. It does get quite dark, although not gratuitously so.

This books writing style is utterly consistent and matches the minds of the characters so beautifully. As readers, we're aware how much of the story is perception& yet, layers keep revealing until the very end. & the pacing! This book is so captivating that the pace is irrelevant & still, I did not wish to look away.

1971, Pittsburgh. Quiet, sensitive Paul feels isolated from his close Jewish family, but when he enters university he meets someone he immediately senses a connection with. Wealthy, sophisticated Julian catches his attention in his freshman ethics class, and the attraction appears to be mutual.Loner Paul seems to have made a friend, and he is eager to do almost anything to remain in Julian's circle. Friendship soon turns to obsession, and Paul begins to see the cruelty beneath Julian's cultured, diffident image. But this discovery does not scare him, for darkness lies within his soul too. As their relationship spirals out of control, it is inevitable that it will spill over into violence, and when it does, there is no turning back.Inspired by a couple of horribly fascinating murder cases, this compelling debut travels beneath the surface to explore the darkness that lies at the heart of two damaged young men - and it is impossible to look away from once you enter their world.What begins as an unlikely friendship between two kindred souls, gradually turns into a relationship built on an obsessive form of co-dependency that gives them each permission to explore their impulses. Sexual desire and a thirst for intellectual growth combine in a violent journey that has Paul and Julian becoming further separated from the expectations placed upon them by their families - particularly when they decide to plan the perfect murder as an abstract exercise that becomes all too real.There is more than a little of Patricia Highsmith meets queer dark academia about this novel, especially in the way Paul and Julian recognise something within each other that sets them off down the path of subversion. Nemerever has a ball with a host of psychologically intriguing themes too: loneliness, repression, sexuality, desire, guilt, responsibility, ethics, philosophy, Jewishness, family dysfunction, the legacy of emotional disturbance, and the blurring of love and hate, all get Nemerever's intimate attention, and keep you hooked to the bitter end.Absolutely compulsive reading.

Well this was one I won’t forget - such mesmerising writing, dark, brooding and malevolent with gut wrenching forbidden love interwoven - 5 star debut novel

Tedious. Got half way through this very long story and had to give up... I didn't find much depth to the characters and the style didn't entice me one bit.