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.

“The Pain of Pleasure is a vivid, beautifully written novel about the line between suffering and salvation.” —Jess Walter, author of bestsellers The Cold Millions and Beautiful Ruins

“Loyd has traveled deeply down into the nexus of pain and pleasure to reveal an endlessly generative pulsing heart. This book is thrilling.” —Lidia Yuknavitch, author of the bestselling The Book of Joan and Thrust

“With The Pain of Pleasure, Loyd has invented an entirely new genre perfectly appropriate to this climatically insane age that blends science with high opera, realism with the surreality of altered states.” —Will Blythe, author of To Hate Like This Is to Be Happy Forever

Amy Grace Loyd is an editor, teacher, and author of the novel The Affairs of Others, a BEA Buzz Book and Indie Next selection. She began her career at independent book publisher W.W. Norton & Company and The New Yorker, in the magazine’s fiction and literary department. She was the associate editor on the New York Review Books Classics series and the fiction and literary editor at Playboy magazine and later at Esquire. She’s also worked in digital publishing, as an executive editor at e-singles publisher Byliner and as an acquiring editor and content creator for Scribd Originals. She has been an adjunct professor at the Columbia University MFA writing program and a MacDowell and Yaddo fellow. She lives between New York and New Hampshire.