Bunny

Mona Awad, a Canadian American writer, published Bunny in Canada in 2019 through Hamish Hamilton. It is her second novel, appearing three years after her first, and it is a black comedy set on a campus, following a creative writing student at a selective New England university who is drawn bit by bit into a close group of friends. The film rights were optioned, and a sequel, We Love You, Bunny, followed in 2025.

Samantha Mackey is a scholarship student in a small, highly selective MFA programme at Warren University. She has no patience for the wealthy cohort she is stuck with, a set of rich girls who call each other Bunny, share one wardrobe and appear to move and speak together. She prefers her own company and the company of her dark imagination.

She accepts an invitation to the group's private salon, drops the one friend she has, and finds their sweet, sinister world very hard to step back out of. The novel keeps the reader close to Samantha's voice, so the question of what is real is never settled by the narration. Awad mixes satire of writing programmes with horror imagery, and the tone moves between comedy and something considerably grimmer.

It is a standalone novel rather than the first of a series, and the sequel was published six years later.