To Place a Rabbit

by Madhur Anand

Globe and Mail’s Best Books of 2025 • CBC’s Best Canadian Fiction of 2025

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 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.

Genres: Canada, Fiction

235 pages, Kindle Edition

Published May 13, 2025

About the author

Madhur Anand's debut book of creative nonfiction "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 (CBC). Her second collection of poems "Parasitic Oscillations" (2022) was also a finalist for the Trillium Award for Poetry and named a Globe and Mail Top 100 Book. "To Place a Rabbit"(Knopf Canada) is her first novel. She is a professor and the director of the Global Ecological Change and Sustainability Laboratory at the University of Guelph, Ontario.

Reviews

[Bonnie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Despite being confused at times about her premise(s), her concept threads intrigued me - and I stayed.

[Frida · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.75 ⭐️

[Whatithinkaboutthisbook · Rating 4 out of 5]

ARC Review To Place a Rabbit by Madhur Anand
Publication Date May 13/25

An ecological scientist attending a literary conference and meets the Novelist, who once wrote a novella that she destroyed as an act of performative art. The novella was translated into French, which the Novelist doesn’t speak, and is the only copy remaining. The Scientist impulsively offers to translate it. Longing to move beyond scientific writing, she sees this as an opportunity to confront her own writers block and to write a fictionalized version of her sapphic relationship with her French Lover.

Written in a classic romance style - think Virginia Woolf, this novel is both imaginative and intellectually provocative. It meditates on the nature of translation, not just of literature and language, but of emotion. memory, desire and identity. Through the exploration of translation, the novel explores how we reshape past loves and fictionalize our stories, allowing the reader to draw rich comparisons between literary and emotional translation.

Artfully layered and poetically written the novel raises questions for reflection such as: Does romance experienced in a different language feel different? Is all life just a “mise en abyme”?Is all desire a form of triangulation? This is a contemplative meditation on love and the mourning of unrealized possibilities.

Though written in a cool, almost clinical tone, - with characters unnamed, it remains emotionally resonant.

Anand’s poetry roots shine through in her lyrical prose. This is a wonderful debut novel and I look forward to see what she writes in the future.

[hc smith · Rating 3 out of 5]

"to place a rabbit... to commit to doing something but not showing up for it"

3.5 - i committed to the novel, but maybe did not show up for it

[delia · Rating 4 out of 5]

rounding up from 3.75

this novel is a compelling exploration of desire, language, and the complexities of human connections. anand’s poetic background shines through as she weaves a story that is both thought-provoking and engaging. the story begins with a scientist offering to re-translate a novelists novella. what starts as a simple intellectual task unravels into something far more personal.

the protagonist’s re-translation process becomes an instrument for exploring not only the nuances of language but also the powerful effects of past love and memory. the scientist, whose neat and tidy life begins to unravel under the weight of her task, becomes consumed by the emotional ghosts of a love affair from her past.

this novel is charming and clever but it didn’t quite hit the mark for me. despite its beauty, the descriptions of the translation efforts were at times disorienting and the characters hard to connect with. this certainly isn’t a dealbreaker, i think many would resonate with and enjoy this imaginative novel.

thank you to netgalley and Penguin Random House Canada for an ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review

[Ian]

Madhur Anand’s bracingly original debut novel, To Place a Rabbit, chronicles several periods in the life of a middle-aged expert in the ecological sciences after she takes on a project to translate a novella into English. The scientist has written a volume of popular science and is touring to promote her book when, at a literary festival, she encounters a fiction writer who is promoting the French translation of her novella, which is titled La Traduction (‘the translation’). The novelist does not read or speak French. She wrote her novella in English, but this version was not published and has been lost. Impulsively, the scientist offers to translate the novella back into English, and thus embarks on a project that links languages, geographies, people and past eras of her own life. The scientist is happily married with children but had tried and failed to write a fictional account of her love affair with a female biologist that took place years earlier. As she begins the translation of La Traduction, she reaches out to her former lover, and they eventually meet after years apart. The narrative is not straightforward. In certain respects, Anand’s novel comes across as a loosely structured account of a person discovering her identity through writing, though defining the book in this manner as a single thing seems mistaken because the story is constantly shape-shifting, looping back on itself. Each chapter is divided into three short sections: in the first we follow the scientist’s contemporary timeline, see her meeting colleagues, travelling, living her life; in the second we are given a portion of her translation of the novella; and the third reaches into the scientist’s past life with her former lover. But each section contains echoes of the others, and as we move through the narrative, the borders separating these storylines blur, and the story’s very nature is altered as these elements merge in a manner akin to a dream. To Place a Rabbit is many things but primarily a novel of ideas, the most prominent of which is the transformative power of language: how a story translated into a second language will undergo fundamental changes; how the language we speak influences the way we perceive and interpret the world. Some may ask if To Place a Rabbit is too clever by half? Perhaps. But it is also absorbing and stimulating, and confirms Madhur Anand as one of the more fearlessly adventurous writers working today.

[Penn Kemp · Rating 4 out of 5]

Madhur Anand, To Place a Rabbit
Not knowing the idiom of her title in French until the narrator explains it, I imagine a rabbit in a magician’s top hat. To Place a Rabbit conjures Rachel Cusk in its lack of proper names for the characters; the meetings at international conferences; a similar distanced tone that immerses the reader in contemplating desire and inspiration its many forms with “the power of translation to mitigate desire, and of fiction to transform the course of reality.” Anand conjures a synchronistic symphony of poppies that mirrors my own mise en abyme: worlds within worlds all reverberating. Just before I start the book, I’ve posted my father’s painting of scarlet poppies for Remembrance Day, a coincidence of recursive co-relations. To Place a Rabbit is a novel of metacognition recasting past moments in the present. Anand’s literary experiment parallels her ecological work as a scientist, shape-shifting, looping back on itself. Lisa Moore is the novelist who inspired the book.

[Peiji · Rating 2 out of 5]

The summary was very intriguing and I really enjoyed the sections of the book that referred to language and translation. The other side of the story with the French lover felt a little boring and flat. I couldn't relate to any of the characters and it felt very rigid. I also had a bit of trouble following the flow of the book because I really enjoyed the first 30%.

I read about 80% of the book and could not finish it. It just wasn't for me.

[Minelle Mahtani · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book deserves major praise. Stunningly scaffolded, intricately woven; beautifully told. I underlined many segments. This book will remind you of Jhumpa Lahiri's new work in the most inspiring way. I hope this book wins all the awards this year!

[Margaryta · Rating 4 out of 5]

REVIEW FORTHCOMING IN ROOM MAGAZINE

[Clivemichael · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting examination of fictive creativity