Rabbits

Hugo Rifkind

From Shelf: New in hardback fiction, June

Rabbits is the much-anticipated, long awaited new novel from columnist Hugo Rifkind. It is a story of drugs, aristocracy, death and disputed inheritance, set in the 1990s - it's Iain Banks meets The Secret History, a journey into a different class and a coming-of-age story in a changing Scotland.

Tommo has just moved to a prestigious boarding school. A product of the middle class, and with new-found independence thrust upon him, he finds himself invited into fading crumbling country houses.

It's the early nineties and the elite he is now surrounded by is struggling for relevance. Alienated from the mainstream, and running low on inherited wealth, his peers have retreated into snobbery and fatalism. Initially awed by their poise and seduced by their hedonism, Tommo gradually becomes aware of sinister undercurrents and a suppressed rage that threatens to explode into violence.

In this world, half-remembered traditions mix with decadence and an awful lot of small dead animals. And sometimes, not just animals. When Tommo's friend Johnnie's brother is found dead, a shotgun at his feet, he realises there are secrets that everyone knows, but no one speaks about, or even acknowledges. And those secrets can no longer be hidden.

'Keeps the outrageous laughs and twists coming in equal measure' - Alexander Larman, The Observer