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ONE OF THE GLOBE AND MAIL'S 37 NEW BOOKS YOU NEED TO READ IN SPRING 2025
A witty, irresistible debut novel from award-winning poet Madhur Anand about entangled desire in books, life and love.
This delightfully clever, artfully layered novel begins when the author of a popular science book attends a literary festival, where she strikes up a friendship with a charismatic novelist. This novelist's recent book is an experiment: a novella that was written in English but published only in French translation-a language the novelist herself cannot read or understand. Moreover, the novelist has lost her original manuscript of the work. The scientist, who is fluent in French, impulsively offers to re-translate the novella back into English for the novelist. But as she embarks on this task, she is haunted by memories, theories and queries-especially about a long-ago passionate affair with a French lover-that insert themselves into the translation process, troubling it, then fraying it, and finally pulling it apart at the seams. As the scientist desperately tries to complete her task before losing control of her well-organized life, both the novelist and the long-ago French lover pop up in the present day, further complicating both life and art. "In its elegant language, intellectual inquiry and emotionally vivid characters and situations, To Place a Rabbit reminded me of the work of Deborah Levy. Smart, and delightful to read . . . an accomplished and thoughtful fiction debut." -Shyam Selvadurai
"To Place a Rabbit is, more than anything, an unconventional love story. A contemplative yet thrilling waking-dream of a novel that has the potency to melt and meld time, language, life, art, and human connection. The kind of reading experience I often seek but rarely find." -Iain Reid
"An inventive and richly imaginative meditation on the art of translation. Madhur Anand's debut novel is accomplished and impressive." -Helen Humphreys
"These pages pull coolly from a meticulous forager's gifted grasp of the human psyche's relentless creativities and labyrinthine hungers . . . To Place a Rabbit is as exquisite a brief novel as you can hope to read." -Canisia Lubrin MADHUR ANAND's debut book of prose, This Red Line Goes Straight to Your Heart (2020), won the Governor General's Literary Award for Nonfiction. Her debut collection of poems, A New Index for Predicting Catastrophes (2015), was a finalist for the Trillium Book Award for Poetry and named one of ten all-time "trailblazing" poetry collections by the CBC. Her second collection of poems, Parasitic Oscillations (2022), was published to international acclaim and named a Globe and Mail Best Book of the Year. She is a professor of ecology and sustainability at the University of Guelph, where she was appointed the inaugural Director of the Guelph Institute for Environmental Research.
A witty, irresistible debut novel from award-winning poet Madhur Anand about entangled desire in books, life and love.
This delightfully clever, artfully layered novel begins when the author of a popular science book attends a literary festival, where she strikes up a friendship with a charismatic novelist. This novelist's recent book is an experiment: a novella that was written in English but published only in French translation-a language the novelist herself cannot read or understand. Moreover, the novelist has lost her original manuscript of the work. The scientist, who is fluent in French, impulsively offers to re-translate the novella back into English for the novelist. But as she embarks on this task, she is haunted by memories, theories and queries-especially about a long-ago passionate affair with a French lover-that insert themselves into the translation process, troubling it, then fraying it, and finally pulling it apart at the seams. As the scientist desperately tries to complete her task before losing control of her well-organized life, both the novelist and the long-ago French lover pop up in the present day, further complicating both life and art. "In its elegant language, intellectual inquiry and emotionally vivid characters and situations, To Place a Rabbit reminded me of the work of Deborah Levy. Smart, and delightful to read . . . an accomplished and thoughtful fiction debut." -Shyam Selvadurai
"To Place a Rabbit is, more than anything, an unconventional love story. A contemplative yet thrilling waking-dream of a novel that has the potency to melt and meld time, language, life, art, and human connection. The kind of reading experience I often seek but rarely find." -Iain Reid
"An inventive and richly imaginative meditation on the art of translation. Madhur Anand's debut novel is accomplished and impressive." -Helen Humphreys
"These pages pull coolly from a meticulous forager's gifted grasp of the human psyche's relentless creativities and labyrinthine hungers . . . To Place a Rabbit is as exquisite a brief novel as you can hope to read." -Canisia Lubrin MADHUR ANAND's debut book of prose, This Red Line Goes Straight to Your Heart (2020), won the Governor General's Literary Award for Nonfiction. Her debut collection of poems, A New Index for Predicting Catastrophes (2015), was a finalist for the Trillium Book Award for Poetry and named one of ten all-time "trailblazing" poetry collections by the CBC. Her second collection of poems, Parasitic Oscillations (2022), was published to international acclaim and named a Globe and Mail Best Book of the Year. She is a professor of ecology and sustainability at the University of Guelph, where she was appointed the inaugural Director of the Guelph Institute for Environmental Research.