The Affairs of Others, Picador

“Forceful, sensual prose.”
—O, The Oprah Magazine

Five years after her young husband's death, Celia Cassill has moved from one Brooklyn neighborhood to another, but she has not moved on. The owner of a small apartment building, Celia believes that she has a right to her ghosts, and she has chosen her tenants for their ability to respect one another's privacy. But everything changes with the arrival of Hope, a dazzling woman of a certain age on the run from her husband's recent betrayal. When Hope begins a torrid and noisy affair, and another tenant mysteriously disappears, the carefully constructed walls of Celia's world are tested and the sanctity of her building is shattered. Ultimately, Celia and her tenants must abandon their separate spaces for a more intimate one, and the promise of genuine joy.

Praise for The Affairs of Others

"Debut novels don’t come any more sure-handed and deftly written than The Affairs of Others. But it’s the damaged, brokenhearted Celia— Amy Grace Loyd’s brave, all-in protagonist—who latches on to us and refuses to loosen her grip.”
—Richard Russo, author of Empire Falls

“[Loyd has] developed her own confident and refined style of storytelling…In expansive and precise language, Loyd explores the rhythms and sensations of human arrangements and exposes layers of time, grief, and love in contemporary urban life.”
―The Millions

“[A] mesmerizing debut…. beautifully, even feverishly described. As Celia discovers, the magnetic pull of other people's everyday experiences proves impossible to resist.”
—Entertainment Weekly

“Loyd succeeds at the most difficult task for such a circumscribed setting—making the granular details of her characters’ travails feel as though they added up to more than the sum of their parts.”
—The New Yorker

The Affairs of Others...has such an intense and heady narrative voice that it recalls those occasions when a substance one has just ingested is a whole lot stronger than expected. Those who look for their experiences of altered consciousness through the legal drug of fiction will be well satisfied." 
—Marion Wink, Newsday

“Celia’s journey is beautifully charted in this debut, with prose that mirrors her existence in her barely furnished apartment—confined, spare, but swirling with fierce emotion and insights.”
—People