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Hello, today on Open Book, headache, groundbreaking novels providing a breath of fresh air in this hot summer heat.

Jackie Kay will be talking to us about her love of the great Antiguan writer

Jamaica Kincaid, and we hear about the secret life of mothers who write from British

Pakistani author Amina Ahmed. But first, a frenetic genre-bending debut about a multitude of characters

living precariously in the American Rust Belt. The Rabbit Hutch is a debut which has just arrived in the UK

with some serious accolades for its author Tess Gunti

from the likes of Jonathan Saffronfoa and Raven Lirnay

and has just been shortlisted for the Waterstone's debut fiction prize.

Set in the town of Vacavale over one hot summer,

the novel opens as Blan Dean, an 18-year-old student, leaves her body after a violent assault.

However, this dry, clever, autodidact Blan Dean is also surrounded by a multifarious cast of characters,

which includes everyone from a former TV child star to a man who paints his body with glow sticks.

These residents are the crumbling apartment block that gives the book its title. Inhabit the novel

like Souls in a Modern Purgatory. It's an inventive and often funny first novel, and I'm glad

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