We Love You, Bunny

We Love You, Bunny (2025) is a novel by Mona Awad, a follow-up to Awad’s successful novel Bunny (2019). Awad, who has completed an MFA and PhD and now teaches at Syracuse University, sets the novel at a small, New England liberal arts college, satirizing the rivalries, melodrama, and idiosyncrasies of a creative writing program. Alongside social satire, the novel explores Authorial Control and Agency Over Narratives, The Pain of Unrequited Desire, and Disappointment Over Failed Role Models. The novel has been short-listed for the 2025 Giller Prize.

This guide uses the 2025 edition published by Simon and Schuster.

Content Warning: The source material and guide feature depictions of bullying, animal cruelty or death, cursing, sexual content, graphic violence, illness and death, sexual violence and harassment, and suicidal ideation and self-harm.

Plot Summary

At the start of the novel, Samantha Mackey (the protagonist of Bunny) returns to the small town where Warren University is located. Samantha (who graduated from the MFA program at Warren) is now a successful novelist whose first book describes the bizarre and violent actions of her classmates: A group of four young women whom she refers to as “the Bunnies.”

The four Bunnies attend Samantha’s reading and abduct her afterward. The Bunnies take Samantha to an attic in an apartment building where one of them (Kyra) lives; they tie Samantha up and threaten her with an axe. While Samatha’s story has been presented as fiction, both she and the Bunnies are aware that it refers to true events. The Bunnies are unhappy with how Samantha has represented them in her novel; they want to tell their side of the story and describe the events that took place prior to Samantha’s narrative.

The four Bunnies are Coraline, Kyra, Viktoria, and Elsinore. They take turns narrating the events of their first semester at Warren. Samantha’s novel begins at the start of their second year, so the Bunnies’ narrative precedes the events Samantha is aware of. The four young women are all part of the cohort who will specialize in fiction writing; Samantha is the fifth member of their cohort. There is also a cohort of five students who will specialize in poetry, all of whom are men. The four Bunnies are initially excited to begin their program and form a close bond with one another. However, they are unhappy when they discover that their first semester workshop is taught by a man named Allan. The Bunnies were excited to study with Ursula, whose novels they adore, but she will not be teaching them until the second semester. The Bunnies find Allan’s criticisms of their writings harsh and upsetting. They increasingly resent him, and they also dislike Samantha because they think she is his favorite.

The Bunnies become strangely infatuated with a wild rabbit. One day, after receiving particularly harsh feedback from Allan, they bring the rabbit back to the attic in Kyra’s building. Driven by some strange, shared intuition, they engage in a ritual that results in the rabbit gruesomely exploding. A short time later, they encounter a beautiful and ethereal young man in the garden where the rabbit lived. The man refers to himself as Aerius. He mimics the Bunnies’ shared hatred of Allan, repeatedly referencing the idea of “killing Allan.” The Bunnies conclude that they have somehow conjured Aerius into being through their ritual with the rabbit. They take him back to the attic and attempt to care for him and acculturate him, providing him with books and music.

The Bunnies are all infatuated with Aerius and feel a possessive and sexualized desire to maintain control over him. They effectively keep him prisoner in the attic, and it becomes apparent that Aerius is growing unhappy. On Halloween night, Aerius escapes from the attic and disappears. The Bunnies are distressed, both because they have lost him and because they fear that Aerius might be capable of violence. He is obsessed with the idea of killing Allan and has taken an axe from the attic with him. At this point, the Bunnies stop telling the story from their perspective and begin to read aloud from a manuscript written by Aerius, recounting events from his own point of view.

Aerius begins his manuscript by explaining that he is now living with someone named “Mother” (eventually revealed to be Ursula), who encourages him to write down his feelings and experiences. He tells the retrospective story of his life, beginning with his creation and being held captive by the Bunnies. When Aerius flees alone on Halloween night, he is confused and disoriented by the strange world around him. He is also compelled by a strange instinct to murder anyone who seems to be named Allan. After stumbling into a frat party, Aerius kills a student named Tyler who is dressed up as Edgar Allan Poe. This murder leads to chaos and an outcry about violence on campus.

Meanwhile, Aerius runs into Jonah, who is studying poetry in the MFA cohort. Aerius (who once briefly met Jonah before) falls in love with him, and the two men have sex, although Jonah is honest about having feelings for someone else. The next day, Aerius is increasingly saddened by his unrequited feelings for Jonah. After murdering two more men due to being confused about them being named Allan, Aerius is abducted by the members of the MFA cohort studying poetry. The Poets want to make Aerius their muse, and they hold him captive for several weeks, as anxiety increases on campus about the strange axe murders.

In late November, a famous poet named Leonard Coel (or “the Immortal”) comes to campus. The Poets take Aerius to a dinner with him, but Aerius panics and flees when he sees the Bunnies at the same restaurant, accompanied by four strange but handsome men. Outside, Leonard runs into Aerius and makes a joke about being “Allen” (alluding to Allen Ginsberg); Aerius kills Leonard but is confused when Leonard seems to take on the form of a rabbit. After an argument with Jonah, Aerius follows the rabbit back to Ursula’s house.

Ursula is immediately entranced with Aerius and believes he is a manifestation of her creative powers. She hides him in a small cottage in her garden and forces him to write: She believes that he will transmit a uniquely creative and transformative type of writing. Aerius plays along because Ursula has made vague promises to return him to the Lost Self that he pines for. In a notebook, he transcribes some of Leonard’s poetry into prose, passing this off as the creative work Ursula demands. He also writes a narrative of his experiences and reflections.

While these events occur over the month of November, the Bunnies search desperately for Aerius. They eventually begin to transform other rabbits into men, calling these creations “hybrids,” but none of them evoke the same feelings as Aerius did. On the same night that Aerius arrives at Ursula’s cottage, the Bunnies go to see her and explain their loss and longing. To their surprise, Ursula is cold toward them and seems preoccupied with her own work.

When classes resume after Christmas and Ursula begins teaching the Fiction Workshop, she disappoints the Bunnies as a teacher. The Bunnies spend months feeling sadder and more confused. By May, classes are coming to an end, and Ursula is excitedly preparing to present some mysterious new work: Unbeknownst to the Bunnies, she is going to present Aerius’s writing as her own. By now, the Bunnies have become suspicious, and they follow Ursula home and confront her, claiming she has stolen Aerius from them, which Ursula angrily denies. However, she later starts trying to seize Aerius’s notebook (which he has avoided showing to her).

Afraid of both Ursula and a group of campus activists who have identified him as a suspect, Aerius panics and flees. By chance, he runs into Allan. Although Aerius initially wants to fulfil his goal of killing Allan, he ends up confiding his true desire: To return to his rabbit self. Allan suggests that writing can be a way of achieving this, and Aerius decides to attend Ursula’s presentation, where she will be sharing her “new work” (Aerius’s notebook). During the presentation, Ursula reads her work, and the Poets recognize it as Leonard’s poetry. The Poets and the Bunnies begin accusing Ursula of plagiarism and theft. As chaos breaks out, Ursula attempts to kill Aerius with the axe, but he is able to seize his notebook and flee. In another room, which is filled with mirrors, Aerius is confronted by the Bunnies, who beg him to return to them. Kyra tries to kill Aerius but strikes one of the mirrors instead.

Aerius runs into Jonah outside. The meeting gives Aerius a new sense of peace and calm, and he gifts Jonah his notebook, realizing that the power of his writing comes from sharing it with others. Later, Aerius runs into Tyler (the student he killed at the Halloween party), who is now in a liminal state between death and life. Aerius and Tyler playfully frolic together and transform into rabbits, symbolizing freedom from their human forms.

Back in the attic, the Bunnies conclude their story to Sam, explaining that they subsequently stole the notebook from Jonah (which is how they have access to Aerius’s narrative). They ask Sam to help them publish their story; when she seemingly agrees, the Bunnies drop their defenses and untie her. However, the individual they have been holding captive immediately begins behaving strangely, brandishing the axe, and revealing that she is not actually Samantha. The individual the Bunnies abducted and held captive was sent as a decoy by Samantha, who did not dare to return to Warren since she suspected the Bunnies would conspire against her.

This individual is now eager to return to her true form (it is not made clear how she was transformed into an exact likeness of Samantha). She leaps from the attic window, clutching the notebook. The Bunnies look out and see that the mysterious individual has transformed into a rabbit; the real Samantha appears and runs off with the rabbit and the notebook.