The Rabbit Hutch
Blandine Watkins is an 18-year-old who aged out of the Indiana state-care system and now lives in La Lapinière, a crumbling Vacca Vale housing complex nicknamed the Rabbit Hutch, with three teenage boys also raised by the state. Across one summer week, Blandine reads the medieval female mystics, plots against the Rust Belt developers gentrifying her dying town, and circles back to the doomed affair with her high-school music teacher that put her in state care in the first place. The book hops perspectives between residents of the building, including a chapter told entirely in marker drawings, and won the 2022 National Book Award for Fiction.
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An 18-year-old who aged out of state care plots against Rust Belt developers from a crumbling Indiana housing complex in this 2022 National Book Award winner.
Yes. The Rabbit Hutch won the 2022 National Book Award for Fiction. Tess Gunty was 30 at the time, one of the youngest National Book Award winners in recent decades.
The Rabbit Hutch uses multiple narrators and unconventional formatting (including illustrations, internet posts, and visual elements). The structure rewards close reading. The novel is around 350 pages.
The Rabbit Hutch was written by Tess Gunty, published in 2022 by Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.
The Rabbit Hutch is a standalone novel by Tess Gunty, not part of a series.
The Rabbit Hutch is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.
