Rainey Royal

Set in the bohemian Greenwich Village of the 1970s, Dylan Landis, winner of a 2014 O. Henry Prize (for "Trust," a section of this novel) weaves a powerful story of girlhood, friendship, and sexuality.

Fourteen-year-old Rainey Royal lives with her father, a jazz musician with a cultish personality, in a once-elegant, now-decaying brownstone. Her mother has abandoned the family, and Rainey fends off advances from her father’s best friend while trying desperately to nurture her own creative drives and build a substitute family. She’s a rebel, even a criminal, but she’s also deeply vulnerable, fighting to figure out how to put back in place the boundaries her life has knocked down, and more than that, struggling to learn how to be an artist and a person in a broken world.

Rainey Royal is told in 14 narratives of scarred and aching beauty that build into a fiercely powerful novel: the harrowing and ultimately affirming story of a young artist.


From the Hardcover edition.

Dylan Landis is the author of Rainey Royal, her debut novel, which includes a 2014 O. Henry Prize selection, and the linked story collectionNormal People Don’t Live Like This, which made Newsday’s Ten Best Books of 2009 andMore magazine’s list of 100 Books Every Woman Must Read. She has received a 2010 National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in fiction, and her work has appeared inTin House, BOMB, House Beautiful and The New York Times. In a past life she wrote six books on interior design. She lives in New York City.

From the Hardcover edition.