Here from her Los Angeles home with one of the year’s most anticipated fiction debuts is Tess Gunty and her brilliant book set in a declining, post-industrial Midwestern town, The Rabbit Hutch (Knopf). It’s one week, and it’s four teenagers, and something happens, really happens.

“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.

“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, joined by Jonathan Safran Foer, Mark Z. Danielewski, Rivka Galchen, Lauren Wilkinson, and others in early praise. 

Tess Gunty will appear in conversation with Samantha Allen, who appeared at Elliott Bay recently to read from her well received debut novel, Patricia Wants to Cuddle.