Raising Hare
Chloe Dalton
Available as Hardback
The magical true story of a woman and an injured hare who taught her how to live again - the perfect Christmas gift for 2024 and an instant Sunday Times bestseller
THE INSTANT SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER
SHORTLISTED FOR WATERSTONES BOOK OF THE YEAR 2024
A BOOK OF THE YEAR FOR THE HAY FESTIVAL, SUNDAY TIMES, THE TIMES, FINANCIAL TIMES, SPECTATOR AND iNEWS
‘A beautiful book’ - ANGELINA JOLIE
‘I will be recommending this to everyone’ - MATT HAIG
‘Quietly profound, beautifully written, Hare is now lodged in my heart’ - TRACY CHEVALIER
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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.
“A great and important tale for our times”
Michael Morpurgo
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“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’
Chloe Dalton
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.
chloedalton.uk | @chloedaltonuk | @raisinghare
“Learning to care for the leveret was a process of experimentation, painstakingly hand-feeding it with powdered kitten milk, which it consumed in microscopic quantities. Warm and soft and almost weightless, it fitted easily within the curve of my hand. I moved it to a bedroom at the farthest end of the barn, where I thought it would be least disturbed, and with a door opening on to the enclosed inner garden. I cut a hole in the side of its box, so the leveret could come and go as it wished.”
Read an extract from Raising Hare by Chloe Dalton in the Guardian.
Guardian