Books Updates
25 Aug 2022
Rust-belt novel set in a fictional Indiana town wins £5,000 cash prize and ‘ongoing commitment’ from the bookseller
The Rabbit Hutch, Tess Gunty's "fiercely original and innovative" debut novel, has won the inaugural Waterstones debut fiction prize.
The Rabbit Hutch follows the residents of an affordable housing complex in Vacca Vale, Indiana, a fictional rust belt town. Poverty, gentrification, and an inadequate care system are all seen through the eyes of Blandine, a "ethereally beautiful and formidably intelligent" young woman who is given the opportunity to leave her surroundings.
Gunty grew up in South Bend, Indiana, and will receive a £5,000 cash prize as well as "the promise of ongoing commitment" from Waterstones. Because she felt her hometown was underrepresented in fiction, she wrote her novel to "reclaim a place derided as 'flyover country,' a place dismissed as unsophisticated and luckless, small-minded and pitiful, boring and ugly and irrelevant." She stated that she wished to "insist" that "these homes and their people are deserving of attention."
"One of the things that frustrates me is that politicians seem to treat the midwest, especially the rust belt, as if it's home to only one kind of voter with pain and rage who is easily exploited, and that voter is usually profiled to be a working-class white man who voted for Trump," Gunty said earlier this year. "In fact, the rust belt is extremely diverse; it's much more diverse than the US on average, and there are lots of different ideologies there," the writer, who now lives in Los Angeles, added. It's a vast and mysterious place."
The Rabbit Hutch was chosen as the winner by a panel of Waterstones booksellers from a shortlist of six debut novels that included Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus, Trespasses by Louise Kennedy, How High We Go in the Dark by Sequoia Nagamatsu, Vagabonds! by Eloghosa Osunde, and Memphis by Tara M Stringfellow.
The novel "really has the air of the next great American novel: it is an exquisite, victorious work that at once echoes the very best of the current canon, while remaining fiercely distinctive and imaginative," said Bea Carvalho, Waterstones' head of fiction.
"Booksellers were blown away by Gunty's playfulness, limitless compassion, and tremendous emotional intellect: this is boundary-pushing, adventurous fiction, and we are enormously excited to see what this remarkable author produces next," she continued.
In her Guardian review, Sarah Ditum stated that The Rabbit Hutch "balances the prosaic with the ecstatic in a way that reminded me of prime David Foster Wallace." It's a love tale presented without sentimentality; a brutality narrative told without gratuity."
The Waterstones debut fiction prize is a new award for first novels of any genre, including translation fiction. The bookstore chain also awards a children's book prize and a book of the year.