Gunty

“On a hot night in Apartment C4, Blandine Watkins exits her body. She is only 18, but she has spent most of her life wishing for this to happen,” begins The Rabbit Hutch. “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 50s.”So whatever happens next, you know that debut author Tess Gunty can nail an opening. What happens next is the gradual, chronology-hopping revelation of who Blandine is, what…

Tess Gunty was born and raised in South Bend, Indiana. It’s the inspiration for Vacca Vale, the post-industrial setting of her debut novel, The Rabbit Hutch, which tracks the entwined fates of a multifarious cast – including a man who paints his body with the liquid from broken glow sticks and a teenage girl aged out of the foster system who is obsessed with female mystics – over the course of a single summer. At its centre is a low-cost housing complex whose name provides the novel’s title. Inventive, heartbreaking and…