To Place a Rabbit

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 a scientist who has written a popular book of non-fiction attends a literary festival, where she strikes up a friendship with a charismatic novelist. The novelist reveals that her new work is an experiment: a novella she wrote in English only to have it translated and published solely in French—a language the novelist cannot read. Moreover, she has lost her original English manuscript of this work. Hearing this, the scientist, who is fluent in French, impulsively offers to retranslate the novella back into English for the novelist.
    As she embarks on this task, the scientist finds herself haunted by vivid memories and distracting questions—particularly about a passionate affair from her own life with a French lover. These insert themselves into her translation process, troubling it, then disrupting it entirely. She desperately tries to complete her task before losing control of both the work and her well-organized existence—but soon the novelist and the French lover reappear in the present, further complicating both life and art.
    Here is sparkling, irresistible debut fiction from one of our most consistently inventive voices, the award-winning and multi-talented Madhur Anand.

MADHUR ANAND's debut book of creative non-fiction 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 10 all-time "trailblazing" poetry collections by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Her second collection of poems Parasitic Oscillations (2022) was also a finalist for the Trillium Book Award for Poetry and named a Globe and Mail Top 100 Book. To Place a Rabbit is her first novel. Anand is a professor and the director of the Global Ecological Change and Sustainability Laboratory at the University of Guelph, Ontario.

ISBN: 9781039055926
Format: Hardback
Pages: 240
Publisher: Knopf Canada
Published: May 13, 2025

"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

“Rendered in immersive prose that is as slippery as memory itself, To Place a Rabbit is a compelling portrait of a person who, undone by desire and inspiration, obsessively analyzes—and tampers with—the evidence of her past.” —Literary Review of Canada