RABBITBOX by the poet Wayne Holloway-Smith is an absolute tour-de-force, a beautiful, yet brutal, story of a young boy and his mother living under the violence of a man supposed to care for them. This absolutely floored me - it so vividly real, so truthful. It is a work which made me care deeply for the boy and his mother - and fear the father's appearance. Despite the brutality there is tenderness here, warmth and real honesty. Five stars from me. Thank you to Netgalley and the publishers for the ARC.

The author is best known for his prize winning and listed poetry (his second collection having being shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize) and for his role as Editor of The Poetry Review, and this his debut novella draws heavily on the poetic form. With two poets on the Booker Prize jury this year I have been on the lookout for literary novels written by poets, and in this case the novel is enthusiastically blurbed by one of the judges; Raymond Antrobus saying “This book is amazing. Imagine a poetry version of DH Lawrence's novel Sons and Lovers blended with Han Kang's novella, The White Book. That could be said of Wayne Holloway-Smith's latest offering, RABBITBOX. Holloway-Smith is more than a talented poet, he's a gifted phrase-maker. RABBITBOX is a lyrically ambitious and powerfully evocative book on trauma and family. Truly a feat.' A blurb which is refreshingly specific. In my views the use of white space is indeed very reminiscent of Han Kang, the comparison to Lawrence’s novel a little more superficial in its set up as a young boy drawn close to a mother who is a victim of domestic violence – although here that is the focus of a novel – but the poetic form renders the novella distinctive from both and the author explicitly draws on another inspiration – the Spring book in Joseph Pintauro’s 1970s illustrated box set of seasonal children’s books for adults “The Rainbow Box” (both title and cover of this book I believe taken from that). This novella uses a fragmentary, poetic, allusion-based approach to effectively address a difficult subject – domestic violence directed against both a wife and a young child – in a way which builds up the story over time and relies on the reader to complete the gaps. My interpretation is as follows: In a small house (24 Coalbrook Street – pretty well the only signifier of time and place we get) a woman and her young son live with the father who on his return from his daily work at a building site rules the house with his judgmental anger which often erupts into physical violence, fuelled by alcohol. The mother takes refuge in trying to make herself as inconspicuous and inoffensive as possible – as she thinks back on how she came to where she is now (a teenage pregnancy, parents who declared she had made her bed and better lie in) and the predicament she is in (where even her bed is no longer a refuge, with an alcohol soused husband demanding conjugal rights). The son in burrowing himself in the clothes of a wardrobe while the worst incidents are occurring. But both in a series of bedtime stories the mother spins for the child in which he is a rabbit and has a young girl Alma as a friend (possibly in the mother’s imagination her own childhood self) and the two hold hands and sneak past the slumbering giant of a father to scape to a beautiful riverside. The book relies brilliantly on repeated motifs and phrases: rhetorical sections headed “A QUESTION”, the repeated phrases “there exists no photo that ..” and “for how long can ..”, a sbravura ection of passages where the flight of girl and rabbit is viewed as though in silhouettes (even as the cover of the book implies shadow puppetry) and so on. Overall I found this an really powerful and moving novel and definitely a Booker contender other than it may be considered too short by some of the judges. Nevertheless highly recommended and perhaps a Goldsmith Prize contender if it does not make the Booker.