The Rabbit Hutch: A Novel (National Book Award Winner) Audiobook

Quotes

• “Gunty treats The Rabbit Hutch like a wall of glass cages at a pet store and we readers are voyeuristic shoppers peering in.”

  — Oprah Daily

• “Inventive, heartbreaking, and acutely funny."

  — The Guardian (London)

• 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.

• “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)

• 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 • Winner of the Indiana Authors Award in Fiction

• “Mesmerizing.”

  — New York Times Book Review

• “A feeling of genuine crisis…propels the narrative through its many twists to the catharsis of its bizarre ending.”

  — Wall Street Journal