The hare-raising experience that changed my life

One wintry day during lockdown, the parliamentary political adviser Chloe Dalton discovered a new-born leveret on the track by her converted barn. It was only as long as her palm’s width, with a white star shape on its forehead. Ambivalent about interfering, she nonetheless gave it houseroom, despite being warned that brown hares can never really be domesticated. This book, her first, is the chronicle of how the animal changed her life.

If, like me, you have become leery of the subgenre (even though this example comes larded with plaudits from Angelina Jolie and Michael Morpurgo) and feel that such writing peaked with Virgil’s apocryphal elegy to his pet housefly, you will find Raising Hare notably different. For a start, the hare of the title (never named nor properly tamed) is no pet, and the author is an unlikely candidate for such experiences, being a committedly urban, globetrotting professional who has not cared for an animal since the age of eight and seems hitherto largely heedless of the natural world.