Credence

Tiernan de Haas has never felt wanted. The only child of distant, famous parents, she has grown up cushioned by money and starved of affection. When her parents die suddenly, the seventeen-year-old is sent to the one place no one expects: a remote cabin high in the Colorado mountains, home to her estranged step-uncle Jake and his two grown sons, Noah and Kaleb.

Cut off from the world by snow and distance, Tiernan is slowly drawn into the rhythms of the Van der Bergs' hard, self-reliant life — and into a charged intimacy with the three men who make up her whole world for the winter. As isolation strips away the usual rules, she begins to feel, for the first time, both truly seen and dangerously unmoored.

Penelope Douglas's Credence is a dark, intense, and deliberately provocative romance about grief, belonging, and desire at the far edge of taboo. Best approached with its content warnings in mind, it is one of the author's most talked-about and polarizing novels.