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.
