Allegra Le Fanu: Editorial director at Bloomsbury Publishing
I first read Rabbit Hole on submission in early 2021 and was captivated from the first page. Teddy’s voice is so striking, so engaging: funny, blackly sardonic, vulnerable in ways she doesn’t realise – and I loved the way that the reader realises how fast she is unravelling long before our narrator catches on.
Kate has such a brilliantly sly comic eye – for the eccentricities of Teddy’s family, her exasperations with her students, for the language and texture of the world of the internet – but the book manages to explore universal themes with such profundity: grief, obsession, trauma, memory, sisters – and how to move through a violent world as a woman.
But as well as being timeless in its universality, Rabbit Hole impressed me with how smartly and astutely it explores the ways that the internet has changed our relationship with crime and violence. Is our contemporary preoccupation with true crime cathartic – a way for us to mediate troubling violence in a chaotic world, where it’s so hard to know who we can trust?
Or should we be thinking harder about the ethics of speculating around other people’s tragedies? Has the anonymity of the internet, and the lawlessness of spaces like Reddit, emboldened us to pass judgement on people’s lives – and fancy ourselves as omniscient? As we’ve prepared for publication, I’ve had fascinating debates about all these issues with Kate and my colleagues – it’s the type of book you need to talk to someone about!
I can’t wait for the world to fall into Rabbit Hole and go on the road with the brilliant, tricksy, captivating Teddy – a heroine and anti-heroine for the ages.
Rabbit Hole by Kate Brody is published on 19 January (Bloomsbury Publishing, Hardback, £16.99)