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.

Dylan Landis is the author of Rainey Royal, her debut novel, which includes a 2014 O. Henry Prize selection, and the story collection Normal People Don’t Live Like This. Her work has appeared in Tin House, BOMB, and The New York Times. In a past life she wrote six books on interior design. She lives in New York City.