This is a ‘feel good’ tale told by a hard-charging political consultant who discovers the beauty and serenity of the natural world through a relationship with a wild hare.

Chloe Dalton is fully immersed in her job as a consultant, providing political advice, writing speeches, and traveling around the world with important diplomats and political figures until the COVID lockdown of 2020 forces her to relocate to her family’s country home in rural England.  There one day while walking in a lane, she comes upon a tiny hare, a several day old leveret of the Lepus europaeus variety, one of 30 different species of hares in the world.  Uncertain about what to do and finding little or no guidance in books,or from vets or family members, Chloe wraps the leveret in grass, takes her (yes, it turns out to be a reproductively active female) home, feeds her from a dropper with milk designed for kittens, and hopes she has done the right thing.

Turns out that she has, as the hare quickly adapts to life in Chloe’s cottage eventually finding its way into the garden and then into the wider world.  Chloe manages to maintain a workable balance between domestication (no!) and wildness (yes!) as the hare (intentionally never named so as to avoid it being treated as a pet) grows into maturity, eventually facing the dangers of the wider world as well as the pleasures of living a life in the wild.   Chloe even gets to witness the hare’s three litters of new leverets.

The book ends with a plea for more wild spaces and less of man’s destructive interventions.

This may have been the most recommended book for me in the last year as my wife, her book club, and a reliable source of great reading, Penny of Vermont all raved about it.  And I’m going to go out on a limb and reveal that I liked it, but didn’t love it. I usually enjoy quiet, pastoral books which blend the factual and the personal, and this book checked those boxes, but it was perhaps too personal, and not being Chloe, at some points I felt that I had heard enough about the hare.

On the other hand, it’s a rather remarkable tale of how a human and a wild animal can come to establish a trusting and caring relationship.  While Chloe saved this leveret and succeeding generations, the hare also gave Chloe the quiet peace, a fascinating new interest, and a  supportive relationship during a time of great stress and danger.

Bottom line, this is a fine book and if you like nature, you’ll enjoy it.