"Set in the nineties, this darkly comic coming-of-age story unpacks masculinity, coming-of-age shifts, and the crumbling, decadent Scottish aristocracy with explosive, character-driven verve."
Incredibly compulsive, Hugo Rifkind’s Rabbits is a menacingly funny story of dark secrets, coming-of-age faltering, and the dirty seduction of being sucked into elite circles, in this case a middle-class boy sliding into Scottish aristocracy. Also shot-through with the mystery of a death and its protagonist’s personal loss and dislocation, Rabbits is a droll, bold, disturbing dynamo of a book.
Thanks to his father’s success as a writer whose novels have found big success on the small screen, Tommo is thrust into life as a middle-class fish-out-of-water in an elite Scottish boarding school. Playing out against a 1990s backdrop and soundtrack, Tommo is initially seduced by this weird new world of crumbling castles, shooting estates, murky lochs and decadent social events, but quick to pick up on dark undercurrents, not least when it comes to secrets around the death of his friend’s brother.
Brilliantly, darkly funny, Rabbits is also poignant and profound, with a consummately compelling narrative voice. On that note, I’ll leave the last words to Tommo: “You can’t cling onto things that are crumbling. Because you will break your nails, and you will fall, and then you will look back up and wonder how it can be that something which once seemed as solid as stone itself is now barely there at all.”
| Primary Genre | General Fiction |
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Tommo has just moved to a prestigious boarding school. A product of the middle class, and with new-found independence thrust upon him, he finds himself invited into fading crumbling country houses. It's the early nineties and the elite he is now surrounded by is struggling for relevance. Alienated from the mainstream, and running low on inherited wealth, his peers have retreated into snobbery and fatalism. Initially awed by their poise and seduced by their hedonism, Tommo gradually becomes aware of sinister undercurrents and a suppressed rage that threatens to explode into violence. In this world, half-remembered traditions mix with decadence and an awful lot of small dead animals. And sometimes, not just animals. When Tommo's friend Johnnie's brother is found dead, a shotgun at his feet, he realises there are secrets that everyone knows, but no one speaks about, or even acknowledges. And those secrets can no longer be hidden. 'Keeps the outrageous laughs and twists coming in equal measure' - Alexander Larman, The Observer
Rabbits features in the following genres: General Fiction, Modern and Contemporary Fiction, Crime and mystery: hard-boiled crime, noir fiction, Fiction, Crime and Mystery, Book Club Recommendations, Recommendations
Rabbits is available in Paperback, Digital download, Hardback
Rabbits was written by Hugo Rifkind and published by Polygon an imprint of Birlinn Ltd
Rabbits has 343 pages
£8.99
