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THE RABBIT CLUB

Christopher J. Yates

A Novel

The author of Black Chalk, "the smart summer thriller you've been waiting for" (NPR), returns with a mesmerizing new novel of dark academia about a dangerous secret society at Oxford University and the first-year literature student whose life begins to unravel in its shadow
When Ali McCain, an eighteen-year-old from Los Angeles, is accepted at Oxford, it's a chance to fulfill his dreams. To study English literature in England; to meet true intellectuals; and to glimpse the life he might have lived had his fatherBritish rock star Gel McCain, legendary frontman of the Pale Firesnot abandoned him and his mother when he was a toddler. But not long after he arrives at the storied campus, Ali is drawn into a dark, disorienting world where events grow more and more curious by the day. Trading on his father's name, he gains entry into one of Oxford's oldest and most selective secret societies, the Saracens. As he immerses himself in this rarefied world, he inadvertently sets in motion a series of events that might culminate in disaster. A mind-bending literary house of mirrors, replete with bookish allusions and Easter eggs ranging from Brideshead Revisited to King Lear, The Rabbit Club is an arresting work of dark academia by the category's finest writer.
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Published 2025-07-08 by Hanover Square Press

Comments

Twisty and told from multiple perspectives, this meaty thriller races to a satisfying finish.

The intensity of the storytelling is exhilarating and unsettling.

The list of authors whose books I read automatically is very short, and loses more names than it adds most years. Now the British writer Christopher J. Yates is on it...make no mistake: Yates is the real deal.