The Red Dress
- Author
- Frank Huyler
- Narrator
- Gary Bennett
- Publisher
- Blackstone Publishing
- Publish Date
- 8 December 2026
- Run Time
- 5 hours 30 minutes
- Format
- Audiobook
What to expect
The price of service to wealth and power is exposed when a father’s limits are tested on an ultrarich family’s remote island
Nick, in the wake of a failed marriage, settles for the relative ease of a well-paid job captaining a luxury yacht, but it leaves little time for his seven-year-old daughter Natalie. In a stroke of good fortune, he is offered a mysterious yet lucrative opportunity that allows Natalie to tag along, and they are soon flying across the globe in a private jet. The workload proves light and they are encouraged to enjoy the sun, surf, and island amenities—but they must wear customized digital glasses that shield the identities of his employers. When Natalie is invited to play with their children and her treasured red dress disappears, Nick discovers that everything is not as it seems, and what began as a grand adventure warps into an unsettling mirage.
An exploration of extreme privilege, global inequality, and the power of emerging technology, The Red Dress is also an eloquent story about our search for connection that raises essential questions about what we owe to ourselves and those we love.
Critics Review
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“Riveting. . . . A suspense-filled, character-driven novel about a fraught father-daughter relationship and the father’s work to redefine himself.”
Foreword Reviews (starred review)
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“Restrained but dense with foreboding, [The Red Dress] is a potent parable about the dangers wrought by cloistered elites. . . . [An] incisive adventure.”
Publishers Weekly
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“Frank Huyler is the rare writer who combines a soaring imagination with gorgeous prose and a lapidary social vision. I loved The Red Dress, a beautifully narrated story of a man and his daughter colliding with our shared ‘future’—already too present. The winner-take-all society devours beauty and fragility wherever it finds it, even in the form of a seven-year-old’s cherished red dress.”
Alex Beam, author of Gracefully Insane and Broken Glass
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“The Red Dress is one of the very best novels I’ve read in recent years. It’s all here—the complications of love, work, family, and age brought to bear in the struggle of a good man trying to make a decent life for himself and his young daughter. In the increasingly surreal island paradise where Nick and Natalie find themselves, they encounter not just the weirdness and whims of the ultrarich, but the threat this kind of mind-boggling wealth poses for the rest of us. Frank Huyler is a novelist of the first rank, and The Red Dress had me firmly in its grip from start to finish.”
Ben Fountain, author of Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk and Rasputin Swims the Potomac
User Reviews
No reviews yet.
Details
- Author
- Frank Huyler
- Narrator
- Gary Bennett
- Duration
- 5 hours 30 minutes
- Release Date
- 8 December 2026
- ISBN
- 9798236046572
- Format
- Audiobook
- Publisher
- Blackstone Publishing
- Genre
- Fiction: general and literary, Narrative theme: Interior life
Synopsis
<p><strong><em>The price of service to wealth and power is exposed when a father’s limits are tested on an ultrarich family’s remote island</em></strong></p><p style="text-align: start">Nick, in the wake of a failed marriage, settles for the relative ease of a well-paid job captaining a luxury yacht, but it leaves little time for his seven-year-old daughter Natalie. In a stroke of good fortune, he is offered a mysterious yet lucrative opportunity that allows Natalie to tag along, and they are soon flying across the globe in a private jet. The workload proves light and they are encouraged to enjoy the sun, surf, and island amenities—but they must wear customized digital glasses that shield the identities of his employers. When Natalie is invited to play with their children and her treasured red dress disappears, Nick discovers that everything is not as it seems, and what began as a grand adventure warps into an unsettling mirage.</p><p style="text-align: start">An exploration of extreme privilege, global inequality, and the power of emerging technology, <em>The Red Dress</em> is also an eloquent story about our search for connection that raises essential questions about what we owe to ourselves and those we love.</p>
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