The Woman and the Rabbit

A writer with a Hennessy Award for short fiction and a clutch of actor biographies under his belt, Michael Feeney Callan’s new novel is something of a Kentish Desperate Housewives. Set along the southern coast of the UK, in a moneyed but empty world of “strategic birdbaths” and “vomit on the veranda”, The Woman and the Rabbit presses “the limits of domestic sham” in a variety of ways.

The novel’s protagonist, Patricia, has just turned 50 and struggles with “a loss of form and rhythm” which she did not anticipate. “These days everything felt inefficient, off-focus,” she says, and so she turns for support — somewhat optimistically — to a ladies’ “phoney-baloney, life-enhancing reading circle”. It is a group all about “the chitchat and getting pissed, a kind of compensatory female version of tribal-rugby afters-bash,” and efforts to intellectualise the proceedings predictably come to nothing.