Rabbits

LoveReading Says

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.”

Reviewed by Joanne Owen
Joanne Owen’s lifelong love of reading and writing began when she was growing up in Pembrokeshire, and very much wished that witches (and Mrs Pepperpot) were real.
More reviews by Joanne Owen

About Rabbits

Tommo has just started at a new school – a training ground for the Scottish elite – when his friend Johnnie’s brother is found dead in a Land Rover on a Highland farm. There’s a shotgun at his feet. Nobody seems clear about what has happened, least of all Tommo.

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