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Lila Raicek, whose recent work spans packed West End theaters and Hollywood development rooms, has added another medium to her portfolio: a debut novel that mines themes of desire, reinvention and public shame. The book arrives as the writer navigates simultaneous projects for stage, television and film — a pace that helps explain why her shift into long-form fiction feels timely.
From stage to page
Raicek made her West End breakthrough last year with My Master Builder, a reimagining of an Ibsen story that drew strong notices and sold-out runs. That theatrical success has run in parallel with screen projects: she is turning an earlier play, Vertebrae, into a television series titled Night Float with Nina Dobrev attached, and she is developing a new play, Fire Season, that has attracted attention from performers in New York and on Broadway.
But Raicek says she wrote her novel to do something a play cannot. Where theater and screen allow quick shifts among viewpoints, a novel forces a sustained intimacy with a single consciousness. That inward focus is central to The Plunge, a psychological story told through one woman’s perspective — even when that narrator becomes unreliable.
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A personal reckoning informs the story
The novel began in 2021 after a life rupture: Raicek ended her engagement to Amazon executive Roy Price amid public allegations of sexual misconduct and moved to New York to start over. She describes the book as emerging from that dark, messy period — an attempt to examine how someone rebuilds identity after loss and public upheaval.
In Raicek’s fiction, the protagonist Liv is a Hollywood writer who flees Los Angeles after a chain of traumatic events and lands in Manhattan, where she becomes entangled in an intense and morally fraught love triangle. The narrative travels from New York’s nightlife to the Hamptons and Lake Como, tracing a reinvention that is nonlinear and abrasive rather than tidy.
- My Master Builder — West End play; adaptation of Ibsen themes; received strong reviews and sustained runs.
- Night Float (from Vertebrae) — TV adaptation in development, starring Nina Dobrev.
- Fire Season — new play being read by Broadway actors; in early stages of development.
- The Plunge — debut novel exploring psychological interiority, currently being shopped for film adaptation.
Readers who followed Raicek’s stage work may recognize recurring obsessions: desire, betrayal, and the ways past mistakes reassert themselves. In the West End production, those themes played out through a rekindled affair between an older architect and his former student; in the novel, similar tensions surface inside a singular, often contradictory narrative voice.
“I’ve always been fascinated by stories told from the margins — people who enter worlds they don’t belong to and are changed by them,” Raicek said in a conversation from her New York home. She added that as a woman writer she feels compelled to explore the complexity of female desire, even when that exploration makes characters uncomfortable or difficult to root for.
What to expect next
Raicek confirms she is already working on a screen version of The Plunge, saying a high-profile lead is attached though she declined to name the actor. For now, her attention is split between translating the novel for film and shepherding her stage and television projects forward.
Her creative output, she says, is driven less by commercial calculation than by an urge to follow what preoccupies her — to “go to the thing that obsesses” her, in her words — whether that means the loud immediacy of a theater audience or the solitary, interior reach of a novel.
This profile originally appeared in The Hollywood Reporter.
