The Regulator welcomes Duke alumna Rae DelBianco, author of the critically-acclaimed debut novel, Rough Animals, for a reading and book signing.
Ever since their father's untimely death five years before, Wyatt Smith and his inseparably close twin sister, Lucy, have scraped by alone on their family's isolated ranch in Box Elder County, Utah. That is until one morning when, just after spotting one of their bulls lying dead in the field, Wyatt is hit in the arm by a hail of gunfire that takes four more cattle with it. The shooter: a fever-eyed, fearsome girl-child with an outdated TEC-9 in her left hand and a worn shotgun in her right. They hold the girl captive, but she breaks loose overnight and heads south into the desert. With the dawning realization that the loss of cattle will mean the certain loss of the ranch, Wyatt feels he has no choice but to go after her and somehow find restitution for what's been lost.
Wyatt's decision sets him on an epic twelve-day odyssey through a nightmarish underworld he only half understands; a world that pitches him not only against the primordial ways of men and the beautiful yet brutally unforgiving landscape, but also against himself. As he winds his way down from the mountains of Box Elder to the mesas of Monument Valley and back, Wyatt is forced to look for the first time at who he is and what he’s capable of, and how those hard truths set him irrevocably apart from the one person he’s ever really known and loved. Steeped in a mythic, wildly alive language of its own, and gripping from the first gunshot to the last, Rough Animals is a tour de force from a powerful new voice.
"A brilliant, incandescent debut that will remind everyone of a young Cormac McCarthy."—Philipp Meyer, author of American Rust and Pulitzer Prize finalist The Son
Rae DelBianco grew up in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, where she began competitively showing livestock at the age of eight and founded a beef cattle operation at fourteen. She attended Duke University as a Robertson Scholar, and is an alumnus of Tin House’s Summer Workshop and Curtis Brown’s Novel-Writing Course in London. She lives outside New York City.
Event date:
06/07/2018 - 7:00pm
Event address:
$24.99
ISBN: 9781628729733
Availability: Call for availibilty
Published: Arcade - June 5th, 2018