Tess

Tess Gunty’s “fiercely original and innovative” The Rabbit Hutch has won the inaugural Waterstones debut fiction prize. The Rabbit Hutch focuses on the residents of an affordable housing complex in the fictional rust-belt town of Vacca Vale, Indiana. Issues including poverty, gentrification and an inadequate care system are seen through the lens of Blandine, an “ethereally beautiful and formidably intelligent” young woman who is offered a chance to escape her surroundings.Gunty, who will receive a £5,000 cash prize and…

“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…

My earliest reading memoryI was around seven when I discovered the Nancy Drew mystery series, about a plucky 18-year-old amateur detective. I think clever, independent Nancy made a wonderful role model.My favourite book growing upThe Hobbit by JRR Tolkien. It showed me how words can immerse readers into worlds that don’t exist, and make us long for them to be real.The book that changed me as a teenagerLegend of the Seventh Virgin by Victoria Holt. I was about 13 when I read it, and it introduced me to gothic suspense, and…

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…

NASA scientists have found evidence for a new transiting circumbinary planet. The term refers to any planet which orbits around two different stars. The evidence was received using an unprecedented technique. Researchers used NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) to discover this unique planet. With the use of TESS and its predecessor Kepler space telescope scientists have discovered 14 such planetary bodies till now. Before this discovery, such planets existed only in the speculative and hypothetical…

We salute the Queen Following on from its official reveal at last week’s Summer Game Fest showcase, Naughty Dog has begun slowly drip-feeding new details and clips pulled from its upcoming remake The Last of Us Part I — yesterday, the studio shared footage of one of its redesigned character models, Tess. The incredibly brief clip, posted to the official Twitter, features a side-by-side comparison of the hardened smuggler as she appears in both the original release of The Last of Us and the new remake. While the animation…