National Book Award 2022 For Fiction Handed To Tess Gunty's The Rabbit Hutch

The last honorary literary awards this year - National Book Awards - yesterday have announced their winners. So now we know the best American fiction book of 2022! Tess Gunty's The Rabbit Hutch has beaten her competitors in the final round.

As described by the publisher, The Rabbit Hutch is a savagely beautiful and bitingly funny snapshot of contemporary America, a gorgeous and provocative tale of loneliness and longing, entrapment and, ultimately, freedom. It features the misfit residents of an affordable housing complex in Vacca Vale, Indiana, a dying post-industrial city in the Midwest. Ethereally beautiful and formidably intelligent, Blandine shares her apartment with three teenage boys she neither likes nor understands, all, like her, now aged out of the state foster care system that has repeatedly failed them, all searching for meaning in their lives. Set over one sweltering week in July, the plot culminates in a bizarre act of violence that finally changes everything.

The Rabbit Hutch is Tess Gunty's debut novel. While accepting the prize, Gunty said she was so convinced she wouldn’t win that she did not prepare a speech, but she did read her fellow finalists.

See the winners in other National Book Awards categories here.

Established in 1950, the National Book Award is among the most prestigious literary awards worldwide. Last year the Award for fiction was handed to Jason Mott's Hell Of A Book.