When God was a Rabbit: From the bestselling author of STILL LIFE

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Sarah Winman is an actress who attended the Webber Douglas Academy of Dramatic Art and has gone on to act in theater, film, and television. When God was a Rabbit is her debut novel. She lives in London. I think this early novel was a little less polished than her later work, as you might expect, but it was no less engaging. It's a lovely tale of charming and enigmatic (yet flawed) characters and spans multiple decades. It's a love letter to love itself - in all it's forms and manifestations. Was this so? Well, I started, and was utterly charmed by the child’s eye view of Elly, and her pet rabbit (named God) by her older brother, and by her instant childhood friendship with a fellow quirky and outsider little girl, Jenny Penny. I was fine with the talking rabbit, as a young child’s imagination is unfettered, and believes many things which can’t be true (we tell ourselves later) Though the Jenny Penny coin moment did raise some disquiet, as if we were going to be plunging into magic realism – except it didn’t really go there. When God Was a Rabbit is a book by Sarah Winman that was first published in 2011. It won Winman various awards including New Writer of the Year in the Galaxy National Book Awards [1] and was one of the books chosen by Richard & Judy in their 2011 Summer Book Club. [2] Synopsis [ edit ]

Sarah Winman's bestselli Red says: A wonderful coming-of-age story told in two halves about a girl and her brother experiencing love, in its many forms, for the first time.And then (dismissing the intervening period of teens, puberty, early twenties) we are suddenly ‘after’ Elly has lost her sparkle, Jenny Penny has vanished, but will make a rather surprising and hugely dramatic reconnection (a LOT of operatic life events will have happened) Elly, despite having become somehow personally dimmed, is something loosely involved in media/arts/influence. Winman's fiction debut, spanning the late 1960s and early 2000s, boasts one of the more endearingly unconventional families in a while... [Winman's] quirky voice maintains its energy; even at her most precocious, Elly never wears out her welcome'--Kirkus It with this then that I personally feel that Winman has gone too far with her work. At first, I found her characters, lovely, warm quaint and feasibly British with all their little quirks of decades gone by. In hyper adulthood, Winman stretches her characterisation like it’s on elastic and the themes, storylines and people are stretched far too much, in my humble opinion, to be believed and recognisable. Gloriously offbeat... Winman's narrative voice is beautifully true, with a child's unsentimental clarity. A superb debut. - The Times Sarah Winman’s debut novel “When God was a Rabbit” takes advantage of this convention. Technically it’s about a brother and sister; that sister and her best friend; that brother and his best friend with benefits. It has no plot line that looms, waiting to be solved, fixed, redeemed or rectified, instead it has episodes that must be handled before the next episode or just later.

This 2022 edition contains bonus material including an Author’s Note, short essays about the inspiration behind the novel and on Sarah Winman’s life as a writer, and finally Reading Group questions. Her family’s assorted eccentricities are described with brevity of language that poignantly captures the key aspects of each character and then lets the reader imagine the rest.’When God Was A Rabbit’ was Winman’s debut novel first published in 2011. It was both a critical and commercial success, winning a number of awards. I read it for a reading group in 2013 and appreciated the opportunity to reread. I was delivered by an off-duty nurse in my parents’ bedroom on an eiderdown that had been won in a raffle, and after a swift labor of twenty-two minutes my head appeared and the nurse shouted Push! and my father shouted Push! and my mother pushed, and I slipped out effortlessly into that fabled year. The year Paris took to the streets. The year of the Tet Offensive. The year Martin Luther King Jr. lost his life for a dream.” From the fabulous Ginger, the ageing Shirley Bassey impersonator, to Jenny Penny, Elly’s eccentric and tragic best friend, each character is created with a sense of depth and feeling that draws you in wholeheartedly. A cliché, but this book will have you howling with laughter one minute and reaching for the tissues the next as Winman takes you on a journey through childhood and beyond, all told in Elly’s unique voice. A great debut that cements Winman as an exciting new writer. Coming-of-age novels come with an absolution: They don’t actually have to be about-about anything. They can just be. A series of events, linked or otherwise, that start quirky and end artfully or in some combination of that. I do like the main story; it's about the love and bond between a brother and sister, a family, friendships and love in all forms. It's a beautiful concept, really. But I'm afraid I cannot say I enjoyed the book as much, let alone reread it.

Winman's narrative voice is beautifully true, with a child's unsentimental clarity. A superb debut'--The Times Then various things began to happen to the family, and Elly seemed to be suddenly exposed to a LOT of rather earlier, before proper understanding ‘Freudian moments’. I began to suspect Winman might have a tendency to overpile the dramatic. It’s when a character ceases to be believable that a book loses cachet for me and I felt cheated on the fact that good characters were going to rot somewhere during the mid-second half. I divide my life into two parts. Not really a Before and After, more as if they are bookends, holding together flaccid years of empty musings, years of late adolescent or the twentysomething whose coat of adulthood simply does not fit.”Urma să ne vedem, o singură dată – cel puțin în copilărie -, înainte ca viețile noastre să se despartă precum un râu ce se separă în două brațe, săpând fiecare pământuri noi.” When a life-changing incident occurs, and Elly mentions it to her older brother Joe in an off-handed way, he handles it the best he can and then gives her a gift, a rabbit that she names God. God talks to her, not in the obnoxious way of, say, TV’s Wilfred. Just a sentence or two that provides direction either from his mouth or her imagination. Part One runs from her birth in 1968 to 1980, when she is twelve. Part Two opens in 1995 with Elly now twenty-seven and in receipt of an unexpected letter from her childhood friend, Jenny Penny. I read these book descriptions. They sound on the far side of boring. They almost scream: "I am literature. LIT-er-a-ture. Pronounced the douchey way, dear. I only bore you because you are dumb. If you were actually an intellectual, you would bow before my literary prowess. Read the New Yorker more, darling."

And he uncovered in us a curious need: that we each secretly wanted him to remember us the most. It was strange, both vital and flawed, until I realised that maybe the need to be remembered is stronger than the need to remember.” Elly and her family live through the events of the 1970s, 1990s and the early years of the new millennium - a shared experience for many readers, and one that rings true even at those points where are own memories are different. Winman has the particular gift for being able to spring a momentous event on the reader, whether historical or fictional, with all the unexpected impact of real life. I love a book that pushes the boundaries and dares to be different but this book loses its ethic for me. I like good fiction but this is crazy-mad and a bit pithy, silly and desperate by the end.Apart from the familial adults in her life, these three are Elly's constants; Joe, God and Jenny Penny. Through major relocations - the Portmans from Essex to Cornwall, and then Joe from Cornwall to New York - heartbreaks and trauma, these are the relationships that keep her grounded and loved. Amintirile”, îmi spunea ea, „indiferent cât de mărunte sau de inconsecvente ar fi, sunt paginile care ne definesc”.” Things are complicated in Elly's life and yet the fairy tale, childish quality of Winman's writing means there's a lightness to it all - even the disastrous nativity play that ends with baby Jesus in a coma. Sorry. This review contains a mini spoiler but I couldn't work out how to hide it so if you don't want any giveaway info you'd better ignore this one. However if you are continuing to read, thanks. Firstly, this is a fiction book of two halves. First half I was loving the book and would have given it five stars. Second half – I loved it less so three stars. Rather than go for the average I’ll keep the overall review at three stars. Good book, unusual but messy – I will explain further.