The Pain of Pleasure

A new novel from the author of The Affairs of Others.

Amy Grace Loyd's atmospheric and erotic new novel traces the storms inside us, between us, and around us. Set in a headache clinic in the basement of an abandoned church in Brooklyn during unprecedented extremes of weather, it explores the intimate terrain of human pain and pleasure, how our bodies can collude with us and against us, mislead us all the way to addiction and emotional and sexual obsession.

The story is an increasingly fevered collision of perspectives: those of the Doctor, a man outrunning some ghosts but especially his own desires; Ruth, the nurse hired by the clinic's domineering patron--Mrs. Adele Watson--to spy on the Doctor; and Sarah, a former patient, who has gone missing but left the Doctor a written account of her days before vanishing.

Sarah's journal chronicles an affair she had with a married man, which she believed could solve not only her chronic pain but the loneliness it caused her. But nothing goes to plan, for her, for her dedicated doctor, or for Ruth, already in exile from everyone and everything she once knew. At once interior and expansive, timely and transcendent, THE PAIN OF PLEASURE is a charged, daring, and ultimately hopeful imagining of what we hold on to when the storms keep coming.

"In her second novel, Loyd explores how suffering and our efforts to escape it define us ... She] is a sensuous writer who lingers over details ... no 21st-century reader needs an explanation for aberrant, alarming weather, and Loyd's choice to just make this part of the background of her fictional world creates a wonderfully eerie undertone."--Kirkus

"Loyd's vibrant...latest (after The Affairs of Others) involves alternative medicine and a missing person's case. In an experimental neurology clinic in the basement of a deconsecrated church in Brooklyn, Dr. Louis Berger treats his patients' migraines with marijuana and other, less orthodox, methods... As Loyd delves into each player's side of the story, she crafts memorable characters ... This is worth a look."--Publishers Weekly

"Sensuous and seductive, decisively literary in style, THE PAIN OF PLEASURE strikes an immaculate balance between its many arresting pleasures of language, which stop the reader cold on the page, and its enticing mysteries, which keep the pages turning. Expect to emerge dazed and dazzled--and to go out searching for your own makeshift community."--Esquire

Fiction.