The Rabbit Hutch
THE MULTI AWARD-WINNING NY TIMES BESTSELLER
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- USD 9.99
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- USD 9.99
Descripción editorial
DARKLY HILARIOUS AND SEARINGLY RELEVANT, THE RABBIT HUTCH IS A POWERFUL PORTRAIT OF 21st CENTURY AMERICA, SEEN THROUGH THE EYES OF THE UNFORGETTABLE BLANDINE
Winner of the Waterstones Debut Fiction Prize 2022 * Winner of the National Book Award for Fiction 2022
'Inventive, heartbreaking and acutely funny' Observer
Vacca Vale, Indiana: recently voted number 1 on Newsweek's list of dying American cities. According to the developers, however, it's a city with a whole history of reinvention, one that 'buzzes with the American spirit.'
Not everyone agrees though - certainly not the residents of the Rabbit Hutch, a low-cost housing complex in the once bustling industrial centre, populated by a cast of unforgettable, disenfranchised characters. There's an online obituary writer, a woman waging a solo campaign against rodents and, most notably, eighteen-year-old Blandine, recently released from foster care and determined to stop the developers whatever the cost.
Set over one sweltering week in July, The Rabbit Hutch is a savagely beautiful and bitingly funny snapshot of contemporary America. Bold, experimental and brilliantly written, it will live in the memory long after the final page.
A Waterstones Book of the Year for 2022
'The Rabbit Hutch is 2022's The Secret History' The Big Issue
A Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award * Winner of the Barnes & Noble Discover Prize * An Oprah Daily Book of the Year, 2022
A New York Times bestseller, Sept 3 2023
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Gunty debuts with an astonishing portrait of economically depressed Vacca Vale, Ind., centered on the residents of a subsidized apartment building nicknamed the Rabbit Hutch. The main character is 18-year-old Blandine Watkins, who grew up in foster care and dropped out of high school in junior year. In the opening scene, she is stabbed in her apartment by an unidentified assailant. Gradually, the causes of the crime emerge, followed eventually by the facts, as well as her fate. Along the way, Gunty delves into the stories of Blandine's neighbors, brilliantly and achingly charting the range of their experiences. An erotic flashback of an infant's conception at a motel on higher ground in Vacca Vale called the Wooden Lady ("It's like if manslaughter were a place," one reviewer describes it), where married couple Hope and Anthony hole up during a "1,000-year flood," contrasts with a devastatingly banal and ultimately traumatic sexual encounter between Blandine and her drama teacher the year before. There's also a lonely woman who lives in a state of "flammable peace" due to her sensitivity to noise, with whom Blandine shares her fascination with Catholic mystics before going off to sabotage a celebration involving the city's gentrification scheme with voodoo dolls and fake blood. It all ties together, achieving this first novelist's maximalist ambitions and making powerful use of language along the way. Readers will be breathless.
