December 17, 2025 by Claire 'Word by Word'

Raising Hare by Chloe Dalton

There is nothing quite like a thoughtful work of nature writing to end the year with, as we move from autumn into winter hibernation. I missed out on the Nonfiction November themed reads that many other bloggers participate in, however I seem to have been attracted to reading nonfiction in December.

Best Nature Writing of 2025

Raising Hare by Chloe Dalton shortlisted womens prize nonfiction winner Wainwright Prize 2025

I liked the sound of Raising Hare from the moment I heard of it, when it was longlisted and then shortlisted for the women’s prize for non-fiction. And in these last weeks of the year, it seems to be sustaining interest by readers, having won the Wainwright Prize for Nature Writing and Overall Book of the Year. The chair of judges, referring to it as a ‘soulful debut’ said,

“A whole new audience will be inspired by the intimate storytelling of Chloe Dalton. Raising Hare is a warm and welcoming book that invites readers to discover the joy and magic of the natural world. As gripping and poignant as a classic novel, there is little doubt this will be read for years and decades to come.”

Not a Typical Animal Rescuer

The author Chloe Dalton as we read in her short bio, does not have the typical profile of someone who might rescue an animal. She lived and worked in London as a political adviser and foreign policy specialist, something of a workaholic who travelled a lot and was always on hand when needed. So this story and transformation likely would not have happened, had there not been a lock down that sent her to her home in the English countryside and changed the way she lived and worked.

If I had an addiction, it was to the adrenaline rush of responding to events and crises, and to travel, which I often had to do, at a few hours notice.

It makes me wonder how many other unique experiences with nature and wildlife occurred during this time, when the world slowed down and people started noticing how we live and the detrimental impact we are having, even in a small acreage like this.

Born in a Pandemic

It’s the story of how a woman, living alone in the English countryside encounters a leveret after hearing a dog barking, clearly disturbing the nest. Initially ignoring it, then four hours later when it had not moved, she could not – the poor thing as small as the palm of her hand, frozen in the middle of a track leading directly to her house.

A call to a local conservationist dispelled any notion she had that she could return it to the field later, and further telling her hares could not be domesticated.

I felt embarrassed and worried. I had no intention of taming the hare, only of sheltering it, but it seemed that I had committed a bad error of judgement. I had taken a young animal from the wild – perhaps unnecessarily – without considering if and how I could care for it, and it would probably die as a result. My heart sank.

Overwhelmed and terrified she’d kill it by accident, she begged her sister, who lived with a menagerie of animals to take the leveret. After explaining how unsuitable that cacophonous environment would be for a baby hare, her sister told her ‘You’ll do fine’ and hung up.

Providing Care and Gaining an Education

We then observe where all that leads, not just into the care of a vulnerable animal, but how she educates herself all about leverets and hares, all the while focused on observing its every movement and behaviour, as they live alongside one another throughout the pandemic period and beyond.

I found it highly educational and loved the subtle transformation the author undergoes, as she learns to see her own environment through the purview of local wildlife and in effect provides an update to much existing research and knowledge about this breed, due to the unique opportunity of getting so close to living in proximity to a hare and her protege, while allowing it to stay wild so that it could continue to breed in the wild.

It is a gentle, enquiring, observational work of nature writing and a tender transformation of one human in her own ways, through the observation of the little known leveret, its home environment and habits. It is almost impossible not to be moved by the young hare, coming to know how sensitive the species is, and how it navigates this unorthodox contact with a female human.

I pondered the concept of ‘owning’ a living creature in any context. Interaction with animals nurtures the loving, empathetic, compassionate aspects of human nature. It taps into a primordial reverence towards the living world and a sense of the commonality and connectedness across species. It is a gateway, as I was discovering, into a state of greater respect for nature and the environment as a whole. We all too easily subordinate animals to our will, constraining or confining them to suit our purposes, needs and lifestyles.

Consciousness Raising Around Wildlife

What a chance to have occurred, for someone interested in policy, to take an interest in a more local and domestic situation, pouring herself into the research, taking care of a vulnerable sentient being and starting to consider the changes that can be made, to enable all species, including human to coexist in a less destructive manner.

Hares are the only game species which are not protected by a ‘close season’ in England and Wales: a period of the year during which they cannot be shot and killed. Other ‘game’ species – such as deer, pheasants and partridges, to name a few – are all protected by a close season. Hares by contrast can be shot at any time of year, including during the crucial months of February to September, when they typically raise their young.

Scotland and the rest of Europe already protect hares in this way. Only in England and Wales does this anomaly persist.

Highly Recommended.

Author, 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.

Her debut book, Raising Hare, was an instant Sunday Times and New York Times bestseller. It won the Wainwright Prize for Nature Writing and was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction, and was selected as a Waterstones Book of the Year and as the Hay Festival Book of the Year. It was a Critics Best Books pick for The Times, Financial Times, Guardian, Spectator and iNews and was a Waterstones Non-Fiction Book of the Month.

‘Imagine holding a baby hare and bottle feeding it. Imagine it living under your roof, drumming on your duvet to attract your attention. Imagine the adult hare, over two years later, sleeping in the house by day, running freely in the fields by night and raising leverets of its own in your garden. This happened to me.’

July 21, 2025 by Claire 'Word by Word'

Ghost Wall (2018) by Sarah Moss

In 2020 I read the novel Summerwater by Sarah Moss after having listened to the author speak about her work. I didn’t review it because it didn’t work that well for me, but when I saw this slim novella at a book sale I thought I’d try again. It had been longlisted for the Women’s Prize in 2019.

Family Memory or Normalising Terror

Book cover of novella Ghost Wall by Sarah Moss. The cover shows woven wood that might have been used to recreate an Iron Age hut.

Interestingly, Summerwater was an ‘on-holiday’ novel, a rain soaked 24 hours in the Scottish Highlands, of families stuck in their cabins, inspired by the author’s two week stay under similar conditions, while Ghost Wall is also a tale of a less than salubrious summer holiday.

Teenage Silevia is spending time with her family in an Iron Age re-enactment hut in Northumberland, experiencing what it might have been like to live as they did. There is a Professor and his students also present, whereas Silvie and her father are there because her father, a bus-driver is passionate to the point of obsession about the history of this period.

We were sleeping in the roundhouse, my parents and I. The students had built it earlier in the year, as part of a course on ‘experiential archaeology’, but they had been firmly resistant to my father’s view that everyone should sleep in it together.

The point of the experience was to have a flavour of Iron Age life, a period around 800 BC when people learned how to use iron, which subsequently shifted the way they lived. Still very basic, so much of the holiday is spent foraging for food and for Silvie’s mother, preparing it.

Re-enactment not Reality

Silvie befriends one of the students Molly, who isn’t taking the experience as seriously as the others, who brings a reminder that life is not like this today and challenges some of the things that they do. Silvie admires her rebellious spirit, but is too fearful of her coercive father to defy his requests, finding it impossible to say no and seeing how little it takes for her mother to be punished.

I sometimes think I can tell when two pieces from the same site were made by the same prehistoric person, because the way my hands move is the same. I shivered. Of course, that was the whole point of the re-enactment, that we ourselves became the ghosts, learning to walk the land as they walked it two thousand years ago, to tend out fire as they tended theirs and hope that some of their thoughts, their way of understanding the world, would follow the dance of muscle and bone.

Underlying her experience and in the opening three pages, is the experience of the bog girl who was sacrificed, a story that as we read those pages, it is not clear whether this is a foreshadowing of something that is going to occur, or something from the past that she can imagine and feel, but whatever it is, it starts to feel real, even when she says otherwise.

Silvie, she said, you’re really OK with this, the ghost wall? It’s interesting, I said, I didn’t think it would be but it is. You’re not scared she said. I shrugged. Of what, bones? Of people, she said.

Passion or Persuasion

The novella is atmospheric and becomes increasingly alarming as Silvie gets swept up in the passion of her father and the history professor, who have convinced themselves that there’s nothing wrong with taking the way these people used to live further. Despite her unwillingness, Sylvie also recognises her father isn’t academic like the rest of the team and part of her wants to support him.

It’s slightly terrifying the further things goes and the ending might have been a little abrupt, but then often conclusions are dramatic when an intervention is required, rather than the ideal of thoughtfully addressing real concerns.

Interviewed for the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2019, Sarah Moss, on her inspiration for the novel shared:

I had a writing residency for the Hexham Book Festival, and became fascinated by Hadrian’s Wall and prehistoric arts and crafts. We think of Hadrian’s Wall as the boundary between England and Scotland but neither of those entities existed then; it was the boundary between the Roman empire and the barbarians. There was and is plenty of reason to be thinking about the borders between civilisation and barbarity, nature and culture, insiders and outsiders.

Author, Sarah Moss

Sarah Moss has published eight novels, two memoirs, numerous essays, and academic work on Romanticism, travel, food and gender. Her work has been listed for prizes including the Women’s Prize for Fiction, the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize and the Wellcome Prize.

Her novels are Summerwater, Cold Earth, Night Waking, Bodies of Light, Signs for Lost Children, The Tidal Zone, Ghost Wall and Ripeness (2025). A memoir of her year living in Iceland, Names for the Sea, was shortlisted for the RSL Ondaatje Prize and another My Good Bright Wolf (2025) is about growing up in the 1970’s and how excess self-control affects her early adulthood.

January 14, 2025 by Claire 'Word by Word'

Absolutely & Forever by Rose Tremain

A friend gave me this book to read recently and I brought it with me on holiday intending to read it on the plane, which didn’t happen. It is indeed an ideal holiday read, Rose Tremain being one of those reliable authors so adept at storytelling, at drawing you in to a character’s perspective, imagining their predicament.

When we first meet Marianne, it is the 1950’s, she is fifteen, the only child of regular middle class parents from a semi-rural district in southern England and in her prime for falling helplessly in love with the boy who is paying her attention, Simon Hurst. They are both coming to the end of their schooling years, he with great expectations, she with few.

When I was fifteen, I told my mother that I was in love with a boy called Simon Hurst and she said to me, ‘Nobody falls in love at your age, Marianne. What they get are “crushes” on people. You’ve just manufactured a little crush on Simon.’

When Simon fails to meet the expectations of him, his life plan changes and this will impact Marianne. Her parents dismiss her feelings and put it down to a schoolgirl crush, she describes it as being in the Love Asylum. Unable to let go of her ideas about a life with Simon, she flounders for a while, will eventually move on, but the pattern of unrequited love is never far away from her experience.

Photo by Miquel R. Calafell @ Pexels.com

At school studying Romeo and Juliet, she relates to the Juliet character and wishes for a character like Nurse in her life, one who understands what Romeo and Juliet are doing and how they feel, one kinder than her mother who could hold her and soothe her erratic emotions.

I imagined her listening attentively while I confessed to her that my head was so burdened by my obsession with Simon that I was afraid of becoming a total imbecile. And she would stroke my hair and reassure me that this was a perfectly normal state for young people to be in, that we were all inevitably headed for a stay in the Love Asylum, but that in time the spell would be overcome and normal life would resume.

It is an absorbing story of turning points in people’s lives, the different people they meet, how that can change their trajectory, including the presence of those absent and the illusions harboured of lives not lived, not meant to be lived. It is also a thought provoking depiction of the relationships between generations and the expectations of those coming-of-age in the 1960’s England.

Absolutely and Forever was shortlisted for the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction 2024.

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