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NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER ？ NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FINALIST ？ A NEW YORKER ESSENTIAL READ ？ A Best Book of the Year: The New York Times, TIME, NPR, Oprah Daily, Literary Hub, Kirkus ？ A People Top 10 Book of The Year ？ A Bookpage Top 10 Book of the Year

“Mesmerizing . . . A novel of impressive scope and specificity . . . One of the pleasures of the narrative is the way it luxuriates in language, all the rhythms and repetitions and seashell whorls of meaning to be extracted from the dull casings of everyday life. . . . [Gunty] also has a way of pressing her thumb on the frailty and absurdity of being a person in the world; all the soft, secret needs and strange intimacies. The book’s best sentences ― and there are heaps to choose from ― ping with that recognition, even in the ordinary details.”―Leah Greenblatt, The New York Times Book Review

“The most promising first novel I’ve read this year . . . A feeling of genuine crisis . . . propels the narrative through its many twists to the catharsis of its bizarre ending.”―Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal

"[The Rabbit Hutch] paints a picture of its location...you can get to know everything...history, people, and minutiae... It’s a brilliant meditation on how much we don’t know about our nearest neighbors, and how the places we live can bring us together―or tear us apart." ―Bekah Waalkes, The Atlantic

“Ambitious . . . Despite offering a dissection of contemporary urban blight, the novel doesn’t let social concerns crowd out the individuality of its characters, and Blandine’s off-kilter brilliance is central to the achievement.”―The New Yorker

“Transcendent . . . Compelling and startlingly beautiful . . . Gunty weaves these stories together with skill and subtlety.”―Clea Simon, The Boston Globe

“Riveting . . . 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.”―Sarah Ditum, The Guardian

“Original and incisive . . . This is an important American novel, a portrait of a dying city and, by extension, a dying system. Its propulsive power is not only in its insight and wit, but in the story of this ethereal girl. . . . She is so vibrantly alive and awake that when I finished this book, I wanted to feel that. I wanted to walk outside. I wanted what is real. I wanted to wake up. Tess Gunty’s The Rabbit Hutch is breathtaking, compassionate and spectacular.”―Una Mannion, The Irish Times

“A powerful and brutal book, brimming with dark and funny lines . . . Gunty’s true subject, though, is a land of loneliness, squandered potential and exploitation that feels uniquely American ― and also the human interconnections and strokes of luck that can help us survive it.”―Dorany Pineda, Los Angeles Times

“This seriously impressive debut novel ― about the inhabitants of a low-rent apartment block in small-town Indiana ― thrillingly blends the vivid realism and comic experimentalism so beloved of American fiction. The writing is incandescent, the range of styles and voices remarkable. . . . There’s so much dazzling stuff here, it can be hard to know where to look. . . . What lingers is something simple: the sparkling interiority of its characters.”―Robert Collins, The Sunday Times (London)

“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.”―Jonathan Safran Foer, author of Everything Is Illuminated

“The Rabbit Hutch aches, bleeds, and even scars but it also forgives with laughter, with insight, and finally, through an act of generational independence that remains this novel’s greatest accomplishment, with an act of rescue, rescue of narrative, rescue from ritual, rescue of heart, the rescue of tomorrow.”―Mark Z. Danielewski, author of House of Leaves

“Philosophical, and earthy, and tender and also simply very fun to read―Tess Gunty is a distinctive talent, with a generous and gently brilliant mind.”―Rivka Galchen, author of Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch

“An astonishing portrait . . . Gunty delves into the stories of Blandine’s neighbors, brilliantly and achingly charting the range of their experiences. . . . It all ties together, achieving this first novelist’s maximalist ambitions and making powerful use of language along the way. Readers will be breathless.”―Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Darkly funny, surprising, and mesmerizing . . . A stunning and original debut that is as smart as it is entertaining . . . Gunty pans swiftly from room to room, perspective to perspective, molding a story that . . . is extremely suspenseful and culminates in a finale that will leave readers breathless. With sharp prose and startling imagery, the novel touches on subjects from environmental trauma to rampant consumerism to sexual power dynamics to mysticism to mental illness, all with an astonishing wisdom and imaginativeness. . . . A striking and wise depiction of what it means to be awake and alive in a dying building, city, nation, and world.”―Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

Chapter 1

The Opposite of Nothing

On a hot night in Apartment C4, Blandine Watkins exits her body. She is only eighteen years old, but she has spent most of her life wishing for this to happen. The agony is sweet, as the mystics promised. It’s like your soul is being stabbed with light, the mystics said, and they were right about that, too. The mystics call this experience the Transverberation of the Heart, or the Seraph’s Assault, but no angel appears to Blandine. There is, however, a bioluminescent man in his fifties, glowing like a firefly. He runs to her and yells.

Knife, cotton, hoof, bleach, pain, fur, bliss―as Blandine exits herself, she is all of it. She is every tenant of her apartment building. She is trash and cherub, a rubber shoe on the seafloor, her father’s orange jumpsuit, a brush raking through her mother’s hair. The first and last Zorn Automobile factory in Vacca Vale, Indiana. A nucleus inside the man who robbed her body when she was fourteen, a pair of red glasses on the face of her favorite librarian, a radish tugged from a bed of dirt. She is no one. She is Katy the Portuguese water dog, who licked her face whenever the foster family banished them both in the snow because they were in the way. An algorithm for amplified content and a blue slushee from the gas station. The first pair of tap shoes on the feet of a child actress and the man telling her to try harder. She is the smartphone that films her as she bleeds on the floorboards of her apartment, and she is the chipped nail polish on the teenager who assembled the ninetieth step of that phone on a green factory floor in Shenzhen, China. An American satellite, a bad word, the ring on the finger of her high school theater director. She is every cottontail rabbit grazing on the vegetation of her supposedly dying city. Ten minutes of pleasure igniting between the people who made her, the final tablet of oxycodone on her mother’s tongue, the gavel that will sentence the boys to prison for what they’re doing to Blandine right now. There is no such thing as right now. She is not another young woman wounded on the floor, body slashed by men for its resources―no. She is paying attention. She is the last laugh.

On that hot night in Apartment C4, when Blandine Watkins exits her body, she is not everything. Not exactly. She’s just the opposite of nothing.

All Together, Now

C12: On Wednesday night, in the nine o’clock hour, the man who lives four floors above the crime is staring into an app called: Rate Your Date (Mature Users!). The app glows a deep red, and he is certain that there is no one inside it. Like many men who have weathered female rejection, the man in Apartment C12 believes that women have more power than anyone else on the planet. When evidence suggests that this can’t be true, he gets angry. It is an anger unique to those who have committed themselves to a losing argument. The man―now in his sixties―lies on his sheets in the dark. He is done with the day, but the day is not done with itself; it is still too early to sleep. He is a logger, past his professional expiration date but lacking both the financial and psychological savings to retire. Often, he feels the weight of phantom lumber on his back like a child. Often, he feels the weight of a phantom child on his back like lumber. Since his wife died six years ago, the apartment has seemed empty of furniture, but it is, in fact, congested with furniture. Sweating, the man cradles his large, bright screen in his hands.

nice enuf, like a dad, but fatter then his prof pic. his eye contact = wrong. doesnt ask about u and seems obsessed w/ the prices. velcro wallet, user MelBell23 had commented on his profile two weeks ago. smells like gary indiana. ssuuu

The only other comment on his profile was posted six months ago, by DeniseDaBeast: this man is a tator tot. suuuu

Noise rumbles from an apartment below. A party, he assumes.

C10: The teenager adjusts his bedroom light to flattering bulbs of halo. He runs a hand through his hair, applies a lip balm. Smears a magazine sample of cologne on his chest, although he knows the gesture is absurd. Angles the camera so that it catches his best shapes and shadows. His mother is working the night shift, but he locks his door anyway. Does thirty jumping jacks, thirty push-ups. Texts: Ready.

C8: The mother carries her baby to the couch and pulls up her tank top. He’s not supposed to be awake this late at night, but rules mean nothing to babies. While he nurses, he demands to bond, and the mother tries. Tries again. Tries harder. But she can’t do it. He fires shrewd, telepathic, adult accusation upon her skin. She can feel it. He sucks hard and scratches her with nails too tender to clip, long and sharp enough to cut her. With her free hand, she checks her phone. A text from the mother’s mother: a photo of Daisy the bearded dragon, wearing a miniature biker costume. Cushioned helmet strapped to her spiky coral head, black pleather jacket strapped to her belly. In a Hells Angels font, the back of the jacket reads: dragon disaster. The reptile peers at the camera from her perch on the dining table, her expression unreadable. The mother zooms in on Daisy’s dinosaur eye, which seems to observe her from another epoch, 90 million years in the past.

U got ur baby, I got mine!! wrote the mother’s mother, who now lives in Pensacola with her second husband. HA HA HA! Roy found the costume. . . . . . . isnt she a RIOT??? God bless u and my sweet Grandbaby

Agitated, the young mother swipes out of the text thread and drifts between three social media platforms, feeling the weight and warmth of her baby beneath her right arm, cherishing his tiny sounds of contentment as he nurses. As usual, predators are wreaking havoc on the internet. Predators are the only people in town. If she had to summarize the plot of contemporary life, the mother would say: it’s about everyone punishing each other for things they didn’t do. And here she is, refusing to look at her baby, punishing him for something he didn’t do.

The mother has developed a phobia of her baby’s eyes.

He is four weeks old. For four weeks, she’s been living in the cellar of her mind. All day, she has been feeding her anxiety with Mommy Blogs. They are dreadful, the Mommy Blogs, worse than the medical websites, but likewise designed to exploit your Thanatos. Mothering is the most valuable work you will ever do, the Mommy Blogs declare with rainproof conviction. Before clicking on them, the mother prepared herself for what she previously believed to be the worst possible diagnosis: You are a bad mother. But that was not, in fact, the worst possible diagnosis. You are a psychopath, the Mommy Blogs concluded. You are a threat to us all.

On her sofa, cradling her baby, the mother begins to panic, so she self-soothes. Deep breath in, exhale the tension. Let the forehead, eyebrows, and mouth go slack. Hear nothing but the whirr of the ceiling fan. She’s supposed to imagine her body as a jellyfish, or something. Visualize the boundaries between her body and the rest of the world dissolving. Her cousin Kara taught her these tricks, back when they were roommates.

Before she was a mother, the mother was Hope. “It’s funny that your name is Hope,” Kara once said. “Because you’re, like, so bad at it.” After high school, Hope got a job as a waitress, Kara as a hairdresser. Together, they rented a cheap house near the river. Kara had a taste for neon clothing, cinnamon gum, and anguished men. Her hair color changed every few months, but she favored purple. She was a bafflingly happy person, often belting Celine Dion and dancing as she cooked. Frequently, Hope wondered what it would be like to vacation in her cousin’s psychology. When they were twenty, Kara found Hope in the fetal position on the bathroom tile at three in the morning, sobbing about how frightened she was, frightened of everything, an everything so big it was essentially nothing, a

The Rabbit Hutch is a stunning debut novel about four teenagers―recently aged out of the state foster-care system―living together in an apartment building in the post-industrial Midwest, exploring the quest for transcendence and the desire for love.

“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, best-selling, award-winning author of Luster

The automobile industry has abandoned Vacca Vale, Indiana, leaving its residents behind, too. In a run-down apartment building on the edge of town, commonly known as the Rabbit Hutch, lives one of these people, a young girl named Blandine Watkins, who The Rabbit Hutch centers around. Hauntingly beautiful and unnervingly bright, Blandine lives alongside three teenage boys, all recently aged out of the state foster-care system, all of them madly in love with Blandine. Plagued by the structures, people, and places that not only failed her but actively harmed her, Blandine pays no mind to their affection. All she wants is an escape, a true bodily escape like the mystics describe in the books she reads.

Set across one week and culminating in a shocking act of violence, The Rabbit Hutch chronicles a group of people looking for ways to live in a dying city, a town on the brink, desperate for rebirth. How far will its residents―especially Blandine―go to achieve it? Does one person’s gain always come at another’s expense? Tess Gunty’s The Rabbit Hutch is a gorgeous and provocative tale of loneliness and community, entrapment and freedom. It announces a major new voice in American fiction, one bristling with intelligence and vulnerability.