Tommy Karr

Writing

Some stories need to be broken open before they make sense. I write the ones that live inside the familiar ones, the shadows behind the whimsy, the truth underneath the tale.

NUNN: Or, The White Rabbit’s Tale

What survives when everything you were is taken from you?

Book cover for NUNN: Or, The White Rabbit's Tale, A Novel by Tommy Karr. The cover features a stark white rabbit silhouette centered on a deep teal background filled with dark swirling lines reminiscent of topographic maps or wood grain. The rabbit stands still and upright, casting a faint shadow beneath it. The title NUNN appears in large serif letters near the top, with the subtitle in smaller spaced capitals below it. Delicate star and compass-point ornaments decorate the top and bottom edges within a simple rectangular border frame.
This is a placeholder cover while the real one is in the works. The rabbit approves for now, reluctantly.

Memory is the first thing a tyrant takes. Identity is the second. What’s left is a rabbit with a death sentence, a kingdom in revolt, and questions that cut deeper than any blade.

There’s a rabbit who doesn’t know his name.

He calls himself Nunn. None. Nothing. It’s all that’s left after the Red Queen “peppered” his memories, systematically erasing everything he was. Released from her dungeons with a death sentence hanging over him, find Alice in two tides or lose his head, he sets out across a Wynderland that looks nothing like the story you remember.

The whimsy is a lie. The flowers are informants. The Mad Hatter is hiding something. And Nunn, it turns out, is the one who brought Alice here in the first place.

NUNN: Or, The White Rabbit’s Tale is a completed upmarket literary fantasy novel reimagining Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland from the White Rabbit’s perspective. Set in a totalitarian Wynderland where memory is a weapon and resistance is survival, it explores identity, trauma, and the question that haunts every page: can you be a good person when you can’t remember if you ever were?

At 89,943 words, NUNN will appeal to readers of Gregory Maguire’s Wicked, Leigh Bardugo’s Ninth House, and Naomi Novik’s Uprooted.

Currently seeking representation.

About Tommy Karr

Tommy Karr is a GenX author and communications professional who grew up in a family of storytellers, the kind where the line between truth and a good yarn was never quite clear. He writes dark literary fantasy for adult readers who want their familiar tales broken open and rebuilt into something truer. His debut novel, NUNN: Or, The White Rabbit’s Tale, is a reimagining of Alice in Wonderland that has been quietly consuming him for longer than he’d like to admit. He lives in Michigan with his husband Matt, a senior dog, and a cat with opinions.