Nerve Damage
A Novel
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- Pre-Order
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- Expected 12 May 2026
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- 9,99 €
Publisher Description
A riotous revenge novel about a woman’s quest to escape her stalker ex-boyfriend—by stalking him herself.
"It’s impossible for a book so chilling, so uncanny, so urgent to also be this funny. Nerve Damage is a major debut.”
—Kaveh Akbar, New York Times bestselling author of Martyr!
Clarice’s breakup with P.T. began the usual way—she discovered he was cheating. Then came the constant texts, the nonstop emails from burner accounts, countless phone calls from dozens of different numbers. He showed up outside her apartment and her office. He sent her flowers and poems, and, perhaps most sinister of all, a link to the music video for Dido's “White Flag.” Relief arrived only when Clarice finally obtained a restraining order and one-way ticket from New York to L.A.
Just as the restraining order expires—and three years to the day since she left him—Clarice spots a man who looks suspiciously like P.T. at a nightclub. Could it be him? Her best friend thinks she’s imagining things. Her therapist wants her to focus on healing her inner child. Her mother is busy planning her wedding to her fourth husband. A psychic medium can reveal only that P.T.’s energy is too volatile to locate on the spiritual plane. As painful memories resurface, Clarice is convinced her ex has returned to ruin her life. But with scant evidence to prove it, she takes increasingly unhinged steps to uncover the truth, ultimately leading to a place where paranoia and reality begin to blur.
A profane and poignant debut novel, Nerve Damage is a different kind of survivor narrative, about how far one woman will go to wrest back control of her life in a world determined to send her spiraling.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In the dark and often funny debut novel from Stinson, a young woman comes to believe her stalker ex-boyfriend has followed her across the country. At a bar in Los Angeles, where she moved from Brooklyn two years earlier, Clarice sees a guy who might be her ex, P.T. As she watches this man confidently flirt with the bartender, Clarice grows infuriated, given that their breakup and his subsequent stalking, which caused her to get a restraining order that's recently expired, left her with "the sexual prowess of unleavened bread." In between twice-a-week therapy sessions, Clarice fixates on the possibility that P.T. has followed her across the country. She also recalls better times, such as when P.T. presented her with a four-leaf clover he'd found in Prospect Park; mulls over the nature of love ("Was I rewriting history to deny I ever loved him because of how it turned out?"); and reflects on the irony of how their roles reversed, remembering that when they were together, she was "desperate for him to want me." Stinson raises the stakes as Clarice exhibits stalker tendencies of her own, even following the bartender for clues as to P.T.'s whereabouts. Shot through with acerbic wit, this is both unsettling and un-put-downable.
