A Story Can Be Told About Pain
by Lisa Martin
Find at your local bookstore
978-177439-116-7 | 2025 May | 400 Pages
ABOUT THIS BOOK
When an accident upends their lives, fourteen-year-old Shiloh and her mother Ruth must leave their idyllic home to make a new life in the city. They find housing — through an evangelical church operating out of a strip mall — that backs onto the grounds of the abandoned Pacific Hospital for the Mind. Their lives begin to intersect with their new neighbours — Raymond, a handyman whose painful past is coming to a head; Dave, the disillusioned pastor looking for a new wife; and Madeleine, a 90-year-old former nurse who continues to make pilgrimages to the graves of the patients she once cared for. As Shiloh becomes involved with an undercurrent of teenagers who frequent the grounds of the ruined asylum, her rebellion and grief push her towards choices she can never take back. With evocative, lyrical prose reminiscent of Emily Ruskovich and Marilynne Robinson, A Story Can Be Told About Pain is a profound meditation on loss and survival, a novel that reminds us why we tell each other stories—to revel in the beauty of language, to find solace, and to boldly confront the truth in order to heal.
“Lisa Martin is a thoughtful, beautiful writer and her work brims with compassion and wisdom. This novel contains the beauty and complexity of a knot of wood, offering a deep meditation on trauma, grief, our universal need for asylum, and our enduring human capacity for connection.” — Deborah Willis, award-winning author of Girlfriend on Mars
“Language, memory, and time itself are all interrogated in Lisa Martin’s remarkable novel. I found myself drawn in to the lives and histories of the characters who inhabit the detailed world she has created. A Story Can be Told About Pain brings with it the pleasures of poetry, but it also shimmers and gratifies as––no surprise––a story.” — Meg Wolitzer, best-selling author of The Wife and The Interestings
“Melodic, confident, poetic, detailed. Lisa Martin’s debut novel A Story Can Be Told About Pain hums with life after loss, life held within grief, life and grief intertwined and made beautiful by language unfurled in Martin’s poet’s voice. Amidst the tender chorus of voices, a tentative shelter emerges. A rich, raw, choric narrative linking the lost together in a stumbling dance of hope that tempers the suffering.” — Carrie Snyder, award-winning author of The Juliet Stories and Francie’s Got a Gun
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