Description
A transfixing, heart-rending work which follows a mother and her young son living under the shadow of an all-consuming domestic threat, by T. S. Eliot Prize-shortlisted poet Wayne Holloway-Smith.
24 Coalbrook Street. The house is trembling with a father's anger. It makes a rabbit of a young boy, sends him burrowing into a wardrobe, and leaves his mother standing hapless and mute over the kitchen sink. In this house, how far can a mother’s comfort travel?
From the safety of his hiding place, from the magnitude of his fear, a young girl appears offering a way out. Taking him by the hand, reaching through time, she leads him elsewhere; a mother’s love dreaming him away from their reality to the promise – beautiful yet flickering – of a river.
Haunting, precise and tender, Rabbitbox heralds a major new work from one of Britain's most exciting writers.
Endorsements
‘Powerful… Intense and unforgettable' — Max Porter
‘I’m blown away… An astonishing work' — Amy Key
‘Amazing… Truly a feat' — Raymond Antrobus
‘Devastating, sharp with skilfully wrought language, this book is an ambitious leap into a lyricism that dissembles’ — Guardian
‘It takes a rare poet to make such magic of such brutality, but Holloway-Smith is the rarest — tender, curious, vivid, and wild. He bunches language like a fist, one that unravels into shadow butterflies, the idea of escape... Rabbitbox is my book of 2026.’ — Joelle Taylor