The Rabbit Hutchis a stunning debut novel about four teenagersrecently aged out of the state foster-care systemliving together in an apartment building in the post-industrial Midwest, exploring the quest for transcendence and the desire for love.

Gunty writes with a keen, sensitive eye about all manner of intimaciesthe kind we build with other people, and the kind we cultivate around ourselves and our tenuous, private aspirations.Raven Leilani, best-selling, award-winning author ofLuster

The automobile industry has abandoned Vacca Vale, Indiana, leaving its residents behind, too. In a run-down apartment building on the edge of town, commonly known as the Rabbit Hutch, lives one of these people, a young girl named Blandine Watkins, whoThe Rabbit Hutchcenters around. Hauntingly beautiful and unnervingly bright,Blandine lives alongside three teenage boys, all recently aged out of the state foster-care system, all of them madly in love with Blandine. Plagued by the structures, people, and places that not only failed her but actively harmed her, Blandine pays no mind to their affection. All she wants is an escape, a true bodily escape like the mystics describe in the books she reads.

Set across one week and culminating in a shocking act of violence,The Rabbit Hutchchronicles a group of people looking for ways to live in a dying city, a town on the brink, desperate for rebirth. How far will its residentsespecially Blandinego to achieve it?Does one persons gain always come at anothers expense? Tess GuntysThe Rabbit Hutchis a gorgeous and provocative tale of loneliness and community, entrapment and freedom. It announces a major new voice in American fiction, one bristling with intelligence and vulnerability.