Raising Hare, Chloe Dalton, Canongate, 2025
Raising Hare is Chloe Dalton’s first book and with it she won the Wainwright Prize and the Books are my Bag Readers Award. Raising Hare was also shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction. It chronicles the author’s extraordinary experience of first saving, then living with a leveret (a baby hare), as it grew to adulthood and motherhood, the quiet joy that this brought her, and the connection it helped her to forge with the land in which she lived.
Dalton was a city dwelling professional, working as a political advisor when the covid lockdowns drew her back to her isolated rural barn conversion home, where on one bitterly cold February day she found and rescued the leveret. She had no knowledge of hares or how to care for them but found a way with a little help from her sister and books borrowed and sent to her from the London Library. Her account is suffused with the closest observations of the hare’s physical characteristics, its habits and its surroundings. She writes with great clarity and precision and without any hint of sentimentality and she is as alert to her own responses as she is to the hare’s gradual transformation under her care.
As ever, this book divided opinions: some found the story compelling and inspiring, others while appreciating the latter, found the author’s diversions into her research about hares, hare folk lore, or the effects of farming on the hare’s environment, much less engaging. The Prologue and Afterword seemed slightly odd adjuncts to the core text, the former being imaginary and the latter a mixed account of her book promotion tours, further hare narrative and ecological issues. The book itself is beautifully produced, with elegant line drawings on each cover, inside and out and at the head of each chapter.
One reviewer wrote this about Raising Hare; ‘Come look through this brilliant keyhole of a book to see the life of a single wild animal down to its finest hairs and gestures. Your ears will perk and your body will leap.’ This we were all happy to do.