[A] stunning début...Dektar has a gift for describing the wonders of the natural world, and sensitively inhabits a young cultist’s fragile state.” — The New Yorker on The Ash Family
“Truly a novel for our climate-anxious age.” — New York Times on The Ash Family
“I read The Ash Family in a day … Beryl yearns for a ‘a wild essential life’—one more connected to nature and less obliged to participate in capitalism or eat foods such as pumpkin-spice Cheerios. In this case, an essential life turns out to involve coercion, theft, violence, and homemade napalm. Will young Beryl escape the eco-cult? Does she want to? Is it truly desirable to—as the New Hampshire license plate puts it—‘Live free or die’?” — New York magazine
"If Wild Wild Country was your number one Netflix show of 2018, then you'll love the story of Berie—a 19-year-old who finds belonging in an off-the-grid (and dangerous) collective instead of her freshman dorm.” — Glamour
“Molly Dektar's creepy, brilliant debut novel, The Ash Family has not a whiff of the supernatural about it. Yet it is a top-notch horror story, made even more unsettling by the fact that nothing about what it unravels is particularly far-fetched.” — Minneapolis Star Tribune
“This debut novel is nothing short of compelling . . . a captivating and haunting tale.” — New York Journal of Books
“Although it’s tempting to rush through this near-thriller, The Ash Family is the kind of novel that should be read slowly. Yes, it’s propulsive and ridden with moments of tension, but savoring on the layered secrets found inside the unraveling Ash Family’s farm is the real treat here.”— — Chicago Review of Books
“From the very first few pages of her debut novel about a cult, ‘The Ash Family,’ author Molly Dektar’s substantial writing chops are abundantly clear ... a compelling read about what motivates us as humans and the lengths to which we’ll go to satisfy our needs.” — Associated Press
“In The Ash Family , the brilliant Molly Dektar explores and explodes the lines between ally and enemy, between collaboration and sabotage, between blessing and threat. Dektar evokes the irresistible beauty of the wilderness, and then exposes its ravaging harshness. This mesmerizing, terrifying book asks the hard questions: What should humankind do in the face of environmental catastrophe? Where does the individual end and the communal begin? A powerful tale by a powerful new writer.” — Helen Phillips
“The Ash Family floored me. With stirring insight, nuanced emotion, and prose as beautiful as poetry, this magnificent novel delves into essential questions of need and desire, love and family, success and sacrifice. Molly Dektar is a wholly original writer, and we need her vision and voice more than ever.” — Bret Johnston
"The Ash Family delivered me into a utopia on the knife’s edge—the glory of living holistically in North Carolina’s majestic wild lands, is cut with a toxic mix of narcissism and magnificently bruised characters. Dektar’s unstoppable tale of a country beyond is an addictive read so engrossing I forget where I am. I forget who I am, a surrender so sweet in her able hands." — Samantha Hunt
“The Ash Family is a suspenseful and atmospheric exploration of escape, idealism, and community, a captivating ode to the quest for something more. Molly Dektar writes with great nimbleness and insight, and her debut novel marks the arrival of a wonderful new talent." — Laura van den Berg
"[A] lyrical debut...Dektar’s deft construction of the Ash Family’s world and their environmentalist values brings a meaningful new story to the canon of cult narratives. Perfect for fans of Philip Roth's American Pastoral (1997) and the film Martha, Marcy, May, Marlene ." — Booklist (starred review)
"The novel shines in its thoughtful portrayal of cult members' (likely) complicated feelings: devotion, love, fear, desperation, and purpose. An affecting, cleareyed debut." — Kirkus Reviews
“In her excellent debut, Dektar probes life in a cult with a masterful hand, excavating the troubled mind of a young woman who joins what she thinks is a modern-day commune…Dektar’s eloquent, often poetic prose draws readers into this disturbing, powerful novel.” — Publishers Weekly
"Dektar crafts beautiful prose, lush and loamy in the vein of Thomas Hardy’s naturalism.” — The Paris Review
2023-04-24
Nora first meets the handsome, mysteriously charismatic Nicola in a ski gondola while she’s staying with relatives in Turin. She’s a troubled 15-year-old who self-cuts and obsesses about “different kinds of power,” and he’s slightly older. Nora’s cousin Federica, with whom Nora shares an erotically charged connection, describes Nicola vaguely as “evil,” but when he touches Nora’s shoulder to calm her fear of heights, she experiences a thrilling shock. Five years later, she runs into Nicola at a party at her American college. After they speak briefly, she becomes convinced that, for her, Nicola will always be “the pinnacle of something.” Just what that “something” is becomes the novel’s central unanswered question. Years pass. At 28, Nora believes she’s content living with a “good” man in Brooklyn and working as a researcher for a financial intelligence company. Nora claims she no longer “dwell[s] on control and power.” Wrong! Nicola shows up yet again, and the rest of the novel charts Nora’s slide into their long, increasingly sadomasochistic affair. Recently married and working for his extremely rich, corrupt, perhaps even murderous father, Nicola initially stokes Nora’s desire through talk without touch. His religious mysticism, philosophic pronouncements concerning good and bad, and brutal views on (his own) superiority strike Nora as “romantic,” full of “grand passion, honor, irrational, primitive devotion.” Soon the two are sharing not only interminable conversations, but graphic sex, by turns violent and demeaning as Nicola’s demands intensify. His willing partner, Nora craves his control. She wants to be hit and strangled even while recognizing “something wrong” with Nicola’s entwining of vengeance and intimacy. The book lives inside Nora’s perceptions, which after a while become as redundant as the sex itself.
Perfect for those who like a soupçon of Wittgenstein and a dollop of Meister Eckhart with their sadomasochism.
The Absolutes is fantastic, a dark, utterly absorbing novel about infatuation and power. It has an elegant, headlong intensity that captures its central affair with style and grace to spare.”
author of Early Work Andrew Martin
