NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER • The standout literary debut that everyone is talking about • "Inventive, heartbreaking and acutely funny."—The Guardian A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: The New York Times, TIME, NPR, Oprah Daily, People Blandine isn't like the other residents of her building. An online obituary writer. A young mother with a dark secret. A woman waging a solo campaign against rodents — neighbors, separated only by the thin walls of a low-cost housing complex in the once bustling industrial center of Vacca Vale, Indiana. Welcome to the Rabbit Hutch. Ethereally beautiful and formidably intelligent, Blandine shares her apartment with three teenage boys she neither likes nor understands, all, like her, now aged out of the state foster care system that has repeatedly failed them, all searching for meaning in their lives. Set over one sweltering week in July and culminating in a bizarre act of violence that finally changes everything, The Rabbit Hutch is a savagely beautiful and bitingly funny snapshot of contemporary America, a gorgeous and provocative tale of loneliness and longing, entrapment and, ultimately, freedom. "Gunty writes with a keen, sensitive eye about all manner of intimacies―the kind we build with other people, and the kind we cultivate around ourselves and our tenuous, private aspirations."—Raven Leilani, author of Luster

The Rabbit Hutch provoked a really interesting conversation in NUBClub. Half of the group loved the novel thoroughly and the other half were neutral, liking parts of it but being left cold. What we all agree on is that the novel did a really strong job with its metaphors. Gunty plays with a number of Catholic and mystic metaphors and the imagery of the book is very consistently exploring those elements in clever and funny ways. Gunty is also a good writer and certain scenes (the mother with the baby waiting for her husband to return with pizza, the older couple in the building dealing with a dead mouse, the confessional) were both very true and very funny at times. Also, we drew out a few strong themes in the book about care and responsibility, largely through the main character Blandine/Tiffany, in the ways that she is badly cared for (by her various foster parents, her music teacher, and her roommates) and how she cares for the town (through her artist terrorism against gentrifiers) and animals (in the rescue of the baby goat). We all liked the way Gunty weaved this thread of responsibility for others through all of the stories, from parental neglect to managing comments on online obituaries. But where we split was on our enjoyment of the book. Those who didn't enjoy it keep pointing to how unrealistic so much of it was. The setting of Vacca Vale, Indiana just seemed like a caricature of a failed industrial town, the characters did ridiculous and painfully awkward things, and some scenes (notably the guy who breaks into people's houses covered in glow sticks as revenge for how they wronged him) were just stupid. What the defenders argued was that none of this was meant to be real -- the book was an absurdist work of magic realism that ends in a parodic spiritual experience. From that lens, all the things that the critics found weak were actually meant to be funny. Moment after moment we disagreed about, it was clear that the difference was our perspective on that question. If we thought the book was being realistic, it was terrible, but if we thought the novel was deliberately ridiculous, it was funny. We concluded that our difference in taste boiled down to that distinction. We couldn't figure out why some of us didn't get that the novel was supposed to be absurd from the beginning, but we could all see that if we had, we would have enjoyed it a lot more. The Rabbit Hutch is a good book. Its themes are rich and well explored, the prose is beautiful in passages and Gunty does a great job with images in places, and many of the characters and scenes are true and beautiful. But we can't guarantee you will like the book. Just remind yourself when you start that it's magical realism with an absurd slant. If you don't, it's going to be a much more painful read for you than if you had.