"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 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. A child of the middle class, and with new independence thrust upon him, Tommo finds himself invited into fading crumbling houses. It’s the early nineties and this elite is struggling for relevance. Alienated from the mainstream, and running low on inherited wealth, his peers have retreated into snobbery and fatalism. Half-remembered traditions mix with decadence and an awful lot of small dead animals. And sometimes, not just animals. Awed by their poise and seduced by their hedonism, Tommo gradually becomes aware of sinister currents beneath the surface and a suppressed rage that threatens to explode into violence.
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 Limited an imprint of Birlinn General
Rabbits has 352 pages
£6.99
