This delightfully clever, artfully layered novel begins when the author of a popular science book attends a literary festival, where she strikes up a friendship with a charismatic novelist.

This novelist's recent book is an experiment: a novella that was written in English but published only in French translation — a language the novelist herself cannot read or understand. Moreover, the novelist has lost her original manuscript of the work. The scientist, who is fluent in French, impulsively offers to re-translate the novella back into English for the novelist.

But as she embarks on this task, she is haunted by memories, theories and queries — especially about a long-ago passionate affair with a French lover—that insert themselves into the translation process, troubling it, then fraying it, and finally pulling it apart at the seams. As the scientist desperately tries to complete her task before losing control of her well-organized life, both the novelist and the long-ago French lover pop up in the present day, further complicating both life and art.

(From Knopf Canada)

To Place a Rabbit is available in May 2025.

Madhur Anand is a poet and professor of ecology at the University of Guelph. She is the author of the A New Index for Predicting Catastrophes which was a finalist for the Trillium Book Award for Poetry and This Red Line Goes Straight to Your Heart, which won the 2020 Governor General's Literary Award for nonfiction. Her book Parasitic Oscillations was named a Globe and Mail Best Book of the Year. Anand was also appointed the inaugural Director of the Guelph Institute for Environmental Research.