Rabbit Cake

Rabbit Cake
ISBN: 9781941040560
Publication Date: 7 March 2017

Fans of Maria Semple's Where'd You Go Bernadette and and Kevin Wilson's The Family Fang will delight in Annie Hartnett's debut, a darkly comic novel about a young girl named Elvis trying to figure out her place in a world without her mother.

Elvis Babbitt has a head for the facts: she knows science proves yellow is the happiest color, she knows a healthy male giraffe weighs about 3,000 pounds, and she knows that the naked mole rat is the longest living rodent. She knows she should plan to grieve her mother, who has recently drowned while sleepwalking, for exactly eighteen months. But there are things Elvis doesn't yet knowlike how to keep her sister Lizzie from poisoning herself while sleep-eating or why her father has started wearing her mother's silk bathrobe around the house.

Elvis investigates the strange circumstances of her mother's death and finds comfort, if not answers, in the people (and animals) of Freedom, Alabama. As hilarious a storyteller as she is heartbreakingly honest, Elvis is a truly original voice in this exploration of grief, family, and the endurance of humor after loss.

About the Author

Annie Hartnett is the author of Rabbit Cake (Tin House Books, 2017). She was the 2013-2014 Writer in Residence for the Associates of the Boston Public Library. She has an MFA in Fiction from the University of Alabama, and has received awards and honors from the Bread Loaf School of English, Indiana Review, and McSweeney's. She teaches classes on the short story and the novel at Grub Street, an independent writing center in Boston.

She lives in Providence, Rhode Island with her husband and their beloved border collie