When she begins to have trouble sleeping, Claire Vornoff drives out into the country to become a client of Declan Farrell, and an education (of sorts) begins.

An alternative practitioner and an iconoclast in the medical establishment, Farrell is magnetic, unsettling, and Claire is both beguiled and skeptical as she tries to resist his ability to get through to her. As time goes on, her attachment to him deepens, reinventing itself over and over.

But when she has a brief affair with a married man things escalate, setting in motion a series of startling and unexpected events. Astute, compassionate, and alert to the dilemmas of contemporary urban life, Excessive Joy Injures the Heart charts the tricky anatomy of obsession, and brilliantly captures our neverending quest to remedy the aches in our minds, bodies, and spirits.