The Affairs of Others by Amy Grace Loyd

by:  Amy Grace Loyd
published by:  Picador
publish date:  August 13, 2013

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, she has chosen her tenants for their ability to respect one another’s privacy. 

When Celia's husband dies it leaves her a widow at a young age.  She uses the insurance money to purchase a small apartment building and carefully remodels the building with loving care.  She chooses her new tenants with the same care, so that her life is comfortable and effortless.  All this changes when one of her tenants goes on a sabbatical and sublets his apartment to a desperate, broken friend named Hope.  This event seems to lead to all the other tenants lives changing as well and Celia's well ordered life starts to spiral out of control.

The first thing that struck me about this book was the dark, sexual nature of this book.   The Affairs of Others dealt with dom/sub sexual relationships gone wrong.  This was not a 50 Shades of Gray book but more like when both parties are a little crazy and neither of them want to play by the rules.  Hope is recently divorced and her coping mechanism is her crazy dom boyfriend.  Celia is listening to all this unfolding from her apartment downstairs and doesn't know what to do about it, but is also attracted to her tenant, while wanting to save her.  Throw in the fact that Celia is also attracted to Hope's adult son, and it gets even more weird.  So this was a sex heavy book, and a lot of it was devious and twisted.  That I was not expecting from this book.

This is Amy Grace Loyd's first book.  It was well written.  The story was interesting and I liked the characters.  But I kept having all these questions come up in my mind, how could Celia afford her lifestyle?  How much was the insurance settlement to let her live like that?  How could the old guy afford to live there?  How could Hope for that matter?  Anyway, I kept questioning things like that throughout the book, but I guess that's why it's fiction.