We all fell in love with this book. And we’re not alone. ‘Astounding’, ‘magical’, ‘profoundly beautiful’ are just some of the accolades heaped on it.
Michael Morpurgo calls Raising Hare “a tale for our times.” Praise indeed for first-time writer Dalton, who freely admits to being completely clueless when she found a baby hare, no larger than the palm of her hand, on a track near the North of England home she had retreated to during the Covid pandemic.
Should she leave the leveret or take it home? And if home, then what? There are few guides to raising this mystical and mysterious wild creature.
Dalton feels her way: bottle feeding and living side by side with the growing hare. By day she tiptoes round its sleeping form on her study step, by night it lollops round her bedroom.
An extraordinary relationship develops, but all the while Dalton is preparing to return the hare to the wild and herself to her job as a political adviser in London. Both events happen, but the story doesn’t end there.
Beautifully observed, unsentimental and yet moving, Raising Hare is, concludes Clare Balding, “a philosophical masterpiece ruminating on our place as human beings in nature.”
Illustration: Denise Nestor