The Regulator welcomes Duke alumna Rae DelBianco, author of the critically-acclaimed debut novel, Rough Animals: An American Western Thriller, for a reading and book signing.

Ever since their father's death, Wyatt Smith and his twin sister, Lucy, have scraped by alone on their family's isolated ranch in Box Elder County, Utah. That is until one morning when Wyatt is hit in the arm by a hail of gunfire that takes five 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 The shooter ―a fever-eyed, fearsome girl-child with an outdated TEC-9 in her left hand and a worn shotgun in her right― escapes and heads south into the desert. Wyatt feels he has no choice but to go after her. Wyatt's decision sets him on an epic twelve-day odyssey through a nightmarish underworld he only half understands ―against the primordial ways of men and the beautiful yet brutally unforgiving landscape. Steeped in a mythic, wildly alive language of its own, 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.