Raising Hare

Imagine you could hold a baby hare and bottle-feed it. Imagine that it lived under your roof and lolloped around your bedroom at night, drumming on the duvet cover when it wanted your attention. Imagine that, over two years later, it still ran in from the fields when you called it and snoozed in your house for hours on end. This happened to me.

When lockdown led busy professional Chloe to leave the city and return to the countryside of her childhood, she never expected to find herself custodian of a newly born hare. Yet when she finds the creature, endangered, alone and no bigger than her palm, she is compelled to give it a chance at survival.

Raising Hare chronicles their journey together and the challenges of caring for the leveret and preparing for its return to the wild. We witness an extraordinary relationship between human and animal, rekindling our sense of awe towards nature and wildlife. This improbable bond of trust serves to remind us that the most remarkable experiences, inspiring the most hope, often arise when we least expect them.

Review

"A great and important tale for our times" -- MICHAEL MORPURGO

"This is more than a wildlife memoir, it's a philosophical masterpiece" -- CLARE BALDING

"This book is exceptional. A simply wonderful story, profoundly beautiful" -- CHRIS PACKHAM

"A glorious book - for its warmth, its precision, its joy. It's not dreamy or romantic about the natural world - it's something far better than that" -- KATHERINE RUNDELL

"This is a book of sheer joy and goodness in our times often marked by dark and troubling events. It transports you to a world of long-lost innocence and makes you want to hug the world" ― Financial Times, 'Best Books of 2024'

"A nourishing nature memoir at its finest" ― Sunday Times, 'Books of the Year'

"Raising Hare is a tale of hope, channelled through the enduring and improbable bond between a human and a wild animal. It's a love letter to the natural world" ― The Times

"In steady, elegant, whimsy-free prose, Dalton documents minute observations of her daily coexistence with the leveret. This is indeed a remarkable debut" ― Spectator

"This is the most gorgeous piece of nature writing published this year, and one that ought to become a classic of the genre. [It is] the soul-soothing read we all need right now" ― iNews

"The story of this excellent book is in one sense familiar: a narrator, experiencing a rupture or crisis, is transformed through a magical encounter with a "wild" creature, a hare. But there is much more going on here. Dalton has a zoologist's eye for detail and a poet's sensitivity to language" ― Guardian, 'Book of the Day'

About the Author

Chloe Dalton is a writer, political adviser and foreign policy specialist. She spent over a decade working in the UK Parliament and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and has advised, and written for and with, numerous prominent figures. She divides her time between London and her home in the English countryside. Raising Hare is her first book. It was selected as Hay Festival Book of the Year 2024, shortlisted for Waterstones Book of the Year and a Critics Best Books pick for The Times, Financial Times, Guardian, Spectator and iNews.