Rainey Royal

A “lush, fierce, and stunning novel” about a girl growing up in the bohemian world of 1970s Greenwich Village (Roxane Gay).

Fourteen-year-old Rainey Royal lives with her father, a jazz musician, in a once-elegant, now-decaying brownstone. Her mother has abandoned them, 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 stay whole in a broken world.

From an O. Henry Prize–winning author, Rainey Royal is filled with scarred and aching beauty, the harrowing and ultimately affirming story of a young artist.