Rainey Royal

The acclaimed novel of girlhood, friendship, and sexuality set in the bohemian Greenwich Village of 1970 New York, now in a deluxe edition 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. First published in 2014, this deluxe edition of Rainey Royal includes a new introduction by Jessica Anya Blau. It is a part of the Rainey Royal Cycle, now joined by a new novel-in-stories, List of all Possible Desires, and an expanded version of the 2009 novel-in-stories Normal People Don't Live Like This. Each books stands on its own, but together they echo and amplify one another, creating one of the richest and most intense worlds in contemporary American fiction.