Bunny

Samantha Heather Mackey couldn’t be more of an outsider in her small, highly selective MFA program at New England’s Warren University. A scholarship student who prefers the company of her dark imagination to that of most people, she is utterly repelled by the rest of her fiction writing cohort–a clique of unbearably twee rich girls who call each other “Bunny,” and seem to move and speak as one.

But everything changes when Samantha receives an invitation to the Bunnies’ fabled “Smut Salon,” and finds herself inexplicably drawn to their front door–ditching her only friend, Ava, in the process. As Samantha plunges deeper and deeper into the Bunnies’ sinister yet saccharine world, beginning to take part in the ritualistic off-campus “Workshop” where they conjure their monstrous creations, the edges of reality begin to blur. Soon, her friendships with Ava and the Bunnies will be brought into deadly collision.

The spellbinding new novel from one of our most fearless chroniclers of the female experience, Bunny is a down-the-rabbit-hole tale of loneliness and belonging, friendship and desire, and the fantastic and terrible power of the imagination.

Publisher: Penguin

ISBN: 9780525559757

Publication year: 2020

Format: Softcover

«Every time I open it up, I stumble upon a crackling sentence.» —Dwight Garner, The New York Times

«Awad has proved herself one of the most innovative and original authors out there, and Bunny is a wild, audacious and ultimately unforgettable novel.» —Los Angeles Times

«A work of toothsome and fanged intelligence….wickedly hilarious.» —The New Yorker

«Deliciously evil . . . Awad is a stone-cold genius.» —The Washington Post

«Very funny and very sharp . . . An extremely readable page-turner.» —NPR’s “Weekend Edition”

«A dark, dazzling fairy tale . . . A touching story of true-versus-faux friendship that many women will relate to is at the heart of this novel, but fans of the occult will find plenty to love about the Bunnies’ sci-fi-adjacent ritual experimentation. As if grad school needed to get any scarier.» —Vogue, “The Best Novels of 2019”

«[One of] the most cerebral and compulsively readable books of the season . . . This compelling novel about a mysterious grad school clique draws a bit of inspiration from Mean Girls or Heathers…before long, the novel takes a turn into the surreal, applying the logic of a horror movie to its incisive exploration of cruelty between young women.» —Vanity Fair

«A spiritual cousin to Stephen King’s Carrie . . . Bunny is a kind of pastel-toned goth lit, an examination of what happens when ‘soft’ femininity meets the tougher kind—but one that also recognizes how blurry the distinction can be.» —TIME

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«Wacky and delicious.» —Lauren Groff, via Twitter

«With visuals so vivid, and a plot so weird and gripping that it’s already been snapped up to be made into a TV series, Bunny is a summer book, an escapist comedy, a beach read that you’ll want to pass around. But that’s only partly because it’s rollickingly, laugh-out-loud funny. What makes it memorable, and powerful, is the coupling of its go-for-broke sendup with an immense compassion . . . For all its dagger-sharpness, Bunny has a tenderly accommodating heart.» —The Boston Globe

«It’s creepy and it’s kooky, mysterious and spooky, and you will not be able to put it down.» —The Washington Post

«A surreal, darkly funny take on art, power, and female friendships.» —Entertainment Weekly

«Exquisitely precise [and] funny as hell.» —The Boston Globe

«Like one of those razors marketed to women: you know, pink but still GD dangerous.» —Elle

«To call this a dark comedy undersells the richness of its message, and to say it’s a satire misses its realism. Bunny is so sharp it will leave you bloody.» —Vulture

«The weirdest novel you’ll read this year . . . in the best way possible…With hints of Heathersand Mean Girls, I read Bunny in one night and was genuinely bummed when it was over.» —Mehera Bonner, Cosmopolitan