Nerve Damage

244 pages (ARC) · Simon & Schuster UK | Scribner UK · Expected August 2026

What coercion leaves behind

At a concert in Los Angeles on Halloween, Clarice sees a man she believes is P.T., her former partner, at the bar. She watches him for far longer than she should before leaving. Annakeara Stinson's debut, Nerve Damage, opens on that gap between recognition and confirmation, and stays there.

What follows is both a stalking narrative and an investigation into perception itself: what the body retains after coercion has had time to settle.

Emails, gifts, fake accounts, legal manoeuvres. The narrative moves between present-day Los Angeles and the earlier relationship in New York, reconstructing how what first appeared emotionally consuming gradually turned invasive and impossible to exit. After the breakup, P.T. continues contacting Clarice through friends, lawsuits and repeated attempts to force interaction. Even his absence registers as a form of presence.

Clarice is neither fully reliable nor unreliable. She is right about some things and badly wrong about others. Objects left outside her apartment seem threatening. The bartender sleeping with P.T. is a possible witness. Neighbours, strangers and online traces collapse into the same interpretive field. The discomfort comes from watching vigilance harden into routine.

Objects, strangers and digital traces begin to gather under the same pressure, until the question is no longer simply whether Clarice is right, but what sustained fear has taught her to see. The novel’s argument about perception depends on that instability: certainty keeps forming, then slipping, and the reader is held inside the delay between threat and proof.

By then P.T. is not the only source of damage. A stepfather, one of her mother's husbands, crossed sexual boundaries when Clarice was a teenager; her biological father, an alcoholic, contributed a different kind of harm through abandonment, erratic contact and behaviour her mother can only gesture at obliquely, even on her wedding day. Her mother adds another layer: overwhelming attachment followed by collapse, warmth that vanishes without warning. Long before P.T., Clarice had already learned to associate intensity with safety. Panic and longing arrive together from the start.

Before explanation, the body reacts. Clarice moves through migraines, dissociation, nausea, paralysis, sensory fixation. Fear appears physically first. The title earns itself through recurrence: vigilance settles into muscle memory, anticipation, bodily rehearsal.

The most unsettling passage comes when Clarice starts reproducing what she fears in P.T. She follows him, breaks into his apartment, searches his belongings, smashes his car windows with a hammer. The reversal shifts her position inside the logic of pursuit without erasing the reality of his coercion, and opens the possibility that the pursuit was aimed at a ghost.

There are moments where Stinson explains too quickly what the novel elsewhere allows to remain unstable. Clarice's most articulate passages arrive already resolved: the insight is named before the reader reaches it. The novel still resists casting her as hysteric or clean victim, but that fault is most visible where self-knowledge turns orderly. Nerve Damage is strongest when perception remains simultaneously accurate, distorted and impossible to stabilise, which is also, finally, where it lands.

★★★★☆

Advance reader copy provide by NetGalley and Simon & Schuster UK | Scribner UK