Coming October 6, 2026
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
The Red Dress
by Frank Huyler
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.
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Frank Huyler on The Red Dress
On a trip with my son to Europe, just after the exhausting and frightening years of the Covid-19 pandemic, I briefly visited Monaco. Both of us were struck by the sheer number of absurdly extravagant and futuristic superyachts in the harbor, many of them empty and idle. They seemed cruel, impressive, vulgar, and ridiculous all at once. They also seemed like signifiers, speaking to greater powers that control innumerable ordinary lives in insidious and increasingly ominous ways.
I’ve spent my career as an emergency physician at a public hospital in one of the poorest states in the US. At first glance, my job would seem to have little in common with the professional crews on superyachts, but as I thought about it certain similarities struck me nonetheless. I wondered about the crews on the vessels in the harbor, and especially about those in positions of responsibility. Who were they? Did they examine their own lives? What parallels might be drawn between the servants of the extravagantly rich and the lives of so many others in the modern world? These are the sorts of questions that led me to think of the character of Nick, whose personal struggle and desire to connect with Natalie, his young daughter, are the narrative engines of the story.
I believe this book is extremely timely. Intended to walk the line between allegory and realism, the novel explores global inequality, surveillance, secrecy, the increasing power of technology, the cruelty of systems, and ultimately the search for human warmth in an increasingly dissociated world. Though it seeks to address universal themes, it does so at a particularly fraught time in history, where truth, meaning, identity, and the ability to trust our own senses are being rapidly undermined in unprecedented ways.
