The symbolism of bunnies

You might not immediately think about why there there is a bunny on your book cover. However, looking into it is quite interesting. A bunny or rabbit can symbolize a wide range of ideas. When we look at Easter, rabbits symbolize fertility and new life, just like spring itself. It can also stand for desire and sexuality: think about the Playboy logo. Bunnies also symbolize innocence and vulnerability. We see this often in children’s book illustrations and romantic art, as well as some romance book covers.
In Native American and African tales rabbits are often very clever. They symbolize cunning, wit or deception. In Western cultures it’s often more about luck. Rabbits’ feet are considered lucky charms in some cultures. Bunnies can symbolize hope and good fortune.

With all of this in mind, you can analyse a book cover on your shelves. Most of the time it combines all kinds of symbolism and it reflects duality: the line between innocence and mischief, desire and purity. You see this as well in modern and surrealist art pieces. For example, Jeff Koons’ balloon bunny sculptures look innocent but also symbolize consumerism. In Bunny by Mona Awad the bunny symbolizes innocence as well but the plot if also about the dark side of friendship, about the feeling of being trapped in a rabbit hole.

Books with bunnies on the cover in every genre

Classic bunny books

Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carrol

Witty, whimsical, and often nonsensical, the fiction of Lewis Carroll has been popular for over 150 years. Lewis Carroll takes readers on a trip down the rabbit hole in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, where height is dynamic, animals talk, and the best solutions to drying off are a dry lecture on William the Conqueror and a Caucus Race in which everyone runs in circles and there is no clear winner.

Watership Down – Richard Adams

Set in England’s South Downs, a once idyllic rural landscape, this stirring tale of adventure, courage and survival follows a band of rabbits on their flight from the intrusion of man and the certain destruction of their home. Led by a stout hearted pair of friends, they journey forth from their native Sandleford Warren through the harrowing trials posed by predators and adversaries, to a mysterious promised land and a more perfect society.

Unhinged fiction with bunnies on the cover

Cursed Bunny – Bora Chung

Cursed Bunny is a genre-defying collection of short stories by Korean author Bora Chung. Blurring the lines between magical realism, horror, and science-fiction, Chung uses elements of the fantastic and surreal to address the very real horrors and cruelties of patriarchy and capitalism in modern society.

Bunny – Mona Awad

In this novel we follow Samantha Heather Mackey who is an outsider in her small MFA program at Warren University. Samantha prefers the company of her dark imagination to that of most people, she is utterly repelled by the rest of her fiction writing cohort – a clique of unbearably twee rich girls who call each other Bunny, and seem to move and speak as one.
But everything changes when Samantha receives an invitation to the Bunnies’ fabled Smut Salon, and finds herself inexplicably drawn to their front door – ditching her only friend, Ava, in the process. Bunny is a down-the-rabbit-hole tale of loneliness and belonging, friendship and desire, and the fantastic and terrible power of the imagination.

Historical fiction with rabbits on the cover

The Psychology of Time Travel – Kate Mascarenhas

In 1967, four female scientists worked together to build the world’s first time machine. But just as they are about to debut their creation, one of them suffers a breakdown, putting the whole project—and future of time travel—in jeopardy. To protect their invention, one member is exiled from the team—erasing her contributions from history.
Fifty years later, time travel is a big business. Twenty-something Ruby Rebello knows her beloved grandmother, Granny Bee, was one of the pioneers, though no one will tell her more. But when Bee receives a mysterious newspaper clipping from the future reporting the murder of an unidentified woman, Ruby becomes obsessed: could it be Bee? Who would want her dead? And most importantly of all: can her murder be stopped?

The Confession – Jessie Burton

Hampstead Heath in 1980. Elise Morceau meets Constance Holden and quickly falls under her spell. Connie is bold and alluring, a successful writer whose novel is being turned into a major Hollywood film. Elise follows Connie to LA, a city of strange dreams and swimming pools and late night gatherings of glamorous people. But whilst Connie thrives on the heat and electricity of this new world where everyone is reaching for the stars and no one is telling the truth, Elise finds herself floundering. When she overhears a conversation at a party that turns everything on its head, Elise makes an impulsive decision that will change her life forever.

Three decades later, Rose Simmons is seeking answers about her mother, who disappeared when she was a baby. Having learned that the last person to see her was Constance Holden, a reclusive novelist who withdrew from public life at the peak of her fame, Rose is drawn to the door of Connie’s imposing house in search of a confession…

Romance with bunnies on the cover

Borrow My Heart – Kasie West

With dogs, cats and a bunny on the cover, this might be the cutest YA cover I have ever seen. Borrow My Heart is about Wren, who is used to being called a control freak. She doesn’t care; sticking to the list of rules she created for herself helps her navigate life. But when a cute guy named Asher walks through the door of her neighborhood coffee shop, the rulebook goes out the window.

Asher is cute, charming… and being catfished by his online crush. So Wren makes an uncharacteristically impulsive decision—she pretends to be the girl he’s waiting for to save him from embarrassment. Suddenly she’s fake-dating a boy she knows nothing about. And it’s amazing. It’s not long before Asher has her breaking even more of her own rules. But will he forgive her when he finds out she’s not who she says she is? Wren’s not so sure. After all, rules exist for a reason.

The Secret Lives of Country Gentlemen – K.J. Charles

Bridgerton meets Poldark in this sweeping LGBTQIA+ Regency romance. Abandoned by his father as a small child, Sir Gareth Inglis has grown up prickly, cold, and well used to disappointment. Even so, he longs for a connection, falling headfirst into a passionate anonymous affair that’s over almost as quickly as it began. Bitter at the sudden rejection, Gareth has little time to lick his wounds: his father has died, leaving him the family title, a rambling manor on the remote Romney Marsh, and the den of cutthroats and thieves that make its intricate waterways their home.

Joss Doomsday has run the Doomsday smuggling clan since he was a boy. His family is his life, which is why when the all-too-familiar new baronet testifies against Joss’s sister for a hanging offense, Joss acts fast, blackmailing Gareth with the secret of their relationship to force him to recant. Their reunion is anything but happy and the path forward everything but smooth. Yet after the dust settles, neither can stay away. It’s a long road from there—full of danger and mysteries to be solved—yet somehow, along the way, this well-mannered gentleman may at last find true love with the least likely of scoundrels.

Essays & darkly comic novel’s with bunnies on the cover

Wow, No Thank You – Samantha Irby

I love a good essay collection every now and then and Wow, No Thank You is right up my alley. This is about aging, marriage and settling down with step-children in white, small-town America. Irby is turning forty, and increasingly uncomfortable in her own skin. She has left her job as a receptionist at a veterinary clinic, has published successful books and left Chicago to move into a house with a garden that requires repairs and know-how with her wife and two step-children in a small white, Republican town in Michigan where she now hosts book clubs.
This is the bourgeois life of dreams. She goes on bad dates with new friends, spends weeks in Los Angeles taking meetings with “skinny, luminous people” while being a “cheese fry-eating slightly damp Midwest person,” “with neck pain and no cartilage in [her] knees.”

Rabbit Cake – Annie Hartnett

This is a darkly comic novel about a young girl named Elvis trying to figure out her place in a world without her mother. Twelve-year-old Elvis Babbitt has a head for the facts: she knows science proves yellow is the happiest color, she knows a healthy male giraffe weighs about 3,000 pounds, and she knows that the naked mole rat is the longest living rodent. She knows she should plan to grieve her mother, who has recently drowned while sleepwalking, for exactly eighteen months. But there are things Elvis doesn’t yet know—like how to keep her sister Lizzie from poisoning herself while sleep-eating or why her father has started wearing her mother’s silk bathrobe around the house. Elvis investigates the strange circumstances of her mother’s death and finds comfort, if not answers, in the people (and animals) of Freedom, Alabama.

So, these were books with bunnies on the cover. Some filling the whole cover, some hidden between trees. Let me know which one is your favourite or you know other bunny books I should add to my list.