Rainey Royal Deluxe Edition - (The Rainey Royal Cycle) by Dylan Landis (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

The acclaimed novel of girlhood, friendship, and sexuality set in the bohemian Greenwich Village of 1970, with a new introduction by Jessica Anya Blau

Fourteen-year-old Rainey Royal--fierce, gifted, and dangerously magnetic--lives in a once-elegant, now-crumbling townhouse with her cultish jazz-pianist father and the women who orbit him. Her mother is gone. Her father's best friend hovers too close. And Rainey, left largely to her own devices, must learn to navigate desire, betrayal, and vulnerability in a city that shimmers with promise and threat. As she gathers friends and misfits into her orbit, Rainey tests the limits of who she can become--sometimes a rebel, sometimes a criminal, always a girl determined to recreate herself as both an artist and a young woman in a fractured world.

Each book in the Rainey Royal cycle stands on its own. Together they echo and amplify one another, creating one of the richest and most intense worlds in contemporary American fiction.

Review Quotes

Praise for Rainey Royal

"Fierce, winning, and sharp as a blade."
--Vanity Fair

"Rainey will remain in my mind forever as one of my favorite characters."
--ELLE

"Wild, dangerous, sometimes certain and other times totally lost, Rainey is a fascinating, unique character."
--Los Angeles Times

"It's difficult to remember a novel that was more continually on edge than Rainey Royal, a series of fraught moments that never seem to let off any psychic steam . . . beautifully drawn."
--Chicago Tribune

About the Author

Dylan Landis is the author of three works of fiction in the Rainey Royal Cycle set in 1970s Greenwich Village: the forthcoming novel in stories List of All Possible Desires; the novel Rainey Royal, a New York Times Editors' Choice; and the novel in stories Normal People Don't Live Like This. Her work has appeared in O. Henry Prize Stories, Best American Nonrequired Reading, and other anthologies. She has received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in fiction and lives in Los Angeles.