In this “startling debut by a heady talent” (Seattle Times), two college students with troubled pasts are caught in a mutual obsession that will radically alter the course of their lives.

“A gorgeous and wickedly smart novel. I was so seduced by the dazzling love story of these two vulnerable young men I became an unwitting accomplice in their swerve toward violence. Nemerever has created a rich, engrossing, and morally complex book filled with dark truths and dangerous delights.”— Christopher Bollen, author of A Beautiful Crime

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, Paul is immediately drawn to his classmate’s effortless charm.

Paul sees Julian as his sole intellectual equal—an ally against a suffocating conventional world. 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 to stay together, an obsession that ultimately hurtles 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.