The Rabbit Club

The author of Black Chalk, ‘the smart summer thriller you’ve been waiting for’ (NPR), returns with a mesmerising new novel about a dangerous secret society at Oxford University and the first-year literature student whose life unravels in its shadow.

When Ali McCain, an eighteen-year-old from Los Angeles, is accepted at Oxford, it’s a chance to fulfil his dreams. To study English literature in England; to meet true intellectuals; and to glimpse the life he might have lived had his father — British rock star Gel McCain, legendary front man of the Pale Fires — not abandoned him and his mother when he was a toddler.

But not long after he arrives, Ali is drawn into a dark, disorienting world where events grow more curious by the day. Trading on his father’s name, he gains entry into one of Oxford’s oldest and most selective secret societies, the Saracens. As he immerses himself in this rarefied world, he inadvertently sets in motion a series of events that might culminate in disaster.

A mind-bending literary house of mirrors, replete with bookish allusions and Easter eggs ranging from Brideshead Revisited to King Lear, The Rabbit Club is an arresting new work from a writer of ‘extraordinary skill’ (Washington Post).