Plunge

Lila Raicek is a playwright and screenwriter based in New York. Her hit play My Master Builder debuted in London''s West End in 2025, starring Ewan McGregor and Elizabeth Debicki. In television, she previously wrote on Younger and Gossip Girl. She holds a BA in creative writing from Barnard College, and an MFA in playwriting from Columbia University. The Plunge is her first novel.

"A New York cool girl novel (in the vein of Emma Cline)… a delicious escape and a perfect beach read. Highly recommend!” —Elin Hilderbrand, #1 New York Times bestselling author"Spiked with jealousy, obsession and manipulation... this spicy psychosexual drama...walks into a labyrinth of intrigue...  explor[ing] themes of sexual intoxication, cruelty and romantic triangulation."  —New York Times"If you want a glam, racy New York City novel with elements of dark romance and thriller, take The Plunge this summer." —Time Magazine"A darkly hedonistic roman à clef... against a backdrop of hedonism and glamour spanning Manhattan, the Hamptons, and Lake Como. Liv’s path to reinvention is messy, unruly, and nonlinear...with themes of desire, betrayal, and the mistakes of the past."  —The Hollywood Reporter"Few things are as transporting as a juicy thriller set somewhere fabulous. (See: The Talented Mr. Ripley.) This season's book club winner: The Plunge, Lila Raicek's gripping debut, which flits between Manhattan and Lake Como... This is the smart, sexy, scandalous read of the season."—Town & Country"In the tradition of [Joan] Didion, The Plunge explores the liminal space of life after tragedy." —Bustle "A web of erotic intrigue, betrayal and NSFW texts sent from under dinner tables."—Wall Street Journal“A tantalizing thriller written in nuanced and luminous prose, The Plunge is a deep dive into loss, longing, and the price of passion. Lila writes with a singular power that comes from her understanding of the twists and turns of the complexities of female desire. I was immersed from the first to the last page.”—Daphne Merkin, author of 22 Minutes of Unconditional Love “The Plunge is a tremendous debut novel—gripping, enthralling and sneakily profound—written with great brio and assuredness.”—William Boyd, bestselling author of Any Human Heart“The Plunge is a sophisticated thriller that envelops the reader in secrets—secrets that stimulate and alleviate the narrator’s fear and inertia. But the strain of pretenses and the constant adaptation they require lead to dangerous entanglements here. The narrator, adept at transforming suffering into pleasure, reminds us that the past is a kind of prophecy.”—Susanna Moore, author of The Lost Wife“A startling and smoldering debut that thrums with suspense. The Plunge is a brilliantly crafted study of desire, deception, and the traumatic edges of womanhood that pulls you into its emotional undertow. Raicek will leave you gasping for air long after the final sentence.”—Christina McDowell, author of The Cave Dwellers “The it girl novel of the summer. Like a cult euro-chic thriller...seductive, disquieting, and reveals the dark undercurrents roiling beneath its gleaming surfaces. Raicek writes with a playwright’s propulsive sense of dramatic tension that can make you laugh one page and cry the next—a stunning new voice.”—Marisa Meltzer, Vanity Fair “The Plunge has a villa full of the most scintillating and malevolently eroticized characters since the cunning aristocrats of Les Liaisons Dangereuses. Raicek’s literary debut is thrilling, hypnotic, and whip-smart.”—Griffin Dunne, author of The Friday Afternoon Club“Acclaimed playwright Raicek’s debut novel is a twisty, tense psychological thriller, tantalizingly sexy and explosively unnerving.”—Booklist“A lush erotic-entanglement novel.”—Library Journal"Raicek polishes her prose to a fine gloss....a wildly sensational experience. Full of artifice, it pays tribute to “the razor’s edge between desire and doom.” A tantalizing romantic triangle with more than a hint of menace."—Kirkus Reviews“Playwright Raicek debuts a seductive literary thriller… The plot is propulsive, and Raicek keeps the reader guessing at the characters’ true intentions.”—Publishers Weekly"A jet-set thriller centering around a dangerous liaison... It’s a beach read— if the sand were black, and the glamorous woman two towels over was crying behind oversized Prada sunglasses."—Avenue Magazine "Raicek examines desire (explicitly), grief (without sentimentality), obsession (and why it is often misunderstood in women), and betrayal in all their guises. The result is a propulsive thriller."—Tertulia"The Plunge’s psychosexual intrigue makes it an apt binge read, but the novel deals in less easily packaged emotional territory: what regaining trust—in oneself and others—looks like after trauma, how cycles of denial and avoidance register in a body, where the fear of feeling numb will lead you."—Cultured Magazine