Raising Hare
Chloe Dalton

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Published: 2024

Shortlisted for the 2025 Women's Prize for Non-Fiction

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.

Leafy plant illustration

This is a beautiful meditation on the interactions between the human and the natural world that takes you under its spell. I really like how the book opens up questions of wildness; how do we let the wild into our lives, and what can we do in our own spaces to cultivate a relationship between us and the natural habitat?

Elizabeth Buchan

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