Welcome to The Rabbit Hutch.
An online obituary writer. A young mother with a secret. A woman waging a solo campaign against rodents. Separated by the thin walls of the Rabbit Hutch, a low-cost housing complex in the run-down Indiana town of Vacca Vale, these individual lives unfold.
But Blandine is different. Ethereally beautiful and formidably intelligent, she shares an apartment with three teenage boys she neither likes nor understands, all of them – like her – products of the state foster system. Plagued by her past, let down by the very structures that were supposed to keep her safe, she spends her days reading Dante and dreaming of becoming a female mystic.
Until, that is, one sweltering week in July culminates in an act of violence that will change everything, and finally offer her a chance to escape. Blandine is desperate to save a community that has been left behind, but that salvation will come at a terrible price.
Bristling with intelligence and humour, The Rabbit Hutch is a piercing look at a community on the brink, from a major new voice in American fiction.
About the Author :
Tess Gunty was born and raised in South Bend, Indiana. She received a B.A. in English with an Honors Concentration in Creative Writing from the University of Notre Dame, where she won the Ernest Sandeen Award, and an MFA in Creative Writing from NYU. Her work was nominated for the PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers. Her fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Joyland, No Tokens, The Iowa Review, Flash and other publications. She lives in Los Angeles.
Review :
'A firecracker debut. Seriously impressive... The writing is incandescent, the range of styles and voices remarkable... There’s so much dazzling stuff here.'
'Inventive, heartbreaking and acutely funny.'
'Here is something new, a first novel with the wisdom and tenderness of a masterwork; an unflinching look at the down-and-outs that continue to rise and rise. The Rabbit Hutch is addictive, mesmerizing and unforgettable.'
'Every now and again a debut novel comes along which is so accomplished you almost suspect the writer's name is a pseudonym for a mischievous literary veteran. Sure-footed, richly imagined and highly original, you could say The Rabbit Hutch is 2022's The Secret History… a profound novel full of clever, thought-provoking ideas.'
'Original and incisive... Breathtaking, compassionate and spectacular.'
'Throughout, tension is mixed with hilarity, heartbreak with hope. It all makes for a gripping, memorable debut full of peculiar wonders.'
'Philosophical, and earthy, and tender and also simply very fun to read.'
'Gunty writes with a keen, sensitive eye about all manner of intimacies.'
'Just when everything seemed designed for a brief moment of utility before its planned obsolescence, here comes The Rabbit Hutch, a profoundly wise, wildly inventive, deeply moving work of art whose seemingly infinite offerings will remain with you long after you finish it. Each page of this novel contains a novel, a world.'
'The Rabbit Hutch balances the banal and the ecstatic in a way that made me think of prime David Foster Wallace. It's a story of love, told without sentimentality; a story of cruelty, told without gratuitousness. Gunty is a captivating writer.'
'Author Tess Gunty has the scope and acuity of David Foster Wallace, without the obscurantism and wilfully slow pace... Brilliant.'
'Strange, exuberant... Stylish.'
