Raising Hare by Chloe Dalton

What if the most extraordinary friendship of your life came bounding out of the wild when you least expected it?

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK • FINALIST FOR THE 2025 WOMEN’S PRIZE

When political advisor Chloe Dalton discovered an orphaned leveret in the English countryside during lockdown, she never imagined it would transform everything she understood about trust, wildness, and love. Raising Hare is the luminous true story of an unlikely bond between human and hare—a creature that sleeps under her roof, drums on the duvet for attention, yet remains gloriously, defiantly free.

This isn’t a story about taming the wild. It’s about learning to live alongside it. Through trial and error, Dalton nurtures the fragile leveret, knowing each time it bounds into the fields, it may never return. Yet she never confines it. That tension—between holding on and letting go—pulses through every page.

Part memoir, part meditation, Raising Hare weaves together natural history, folklore, and the simple, startling beauty of watching a wild animal choose your company. Critics are calling it “a philosophical masterpiece” and “a perfect testimony to the transformative power of love.”

For anyone who has ever felt the pull of the natural world, or wondered what it means to truly love something wild, this book is a gift. It reminds us that the most meaningful connections arise not from control, but from trust—and that sometimes, the wild comes home.

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