Excerpt from Raising Hare by Chloe Dalton, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

I rang a local conservationist, formerly a gamekeeper, to explain what had happened and ask for advice. He quickly dispelled my notion that I could return the leveret to the field. He told me that even if it could somehow find its mother, she would reject it, since it would now smell of humans despite my precautions. Moreover, he said that in decades of working on the land, he personally had never heard of anyone successfully raising a leveret. 'You have to accept that it will probably die of hunger, or shock', he said, speaking kindly but bluntly. 'I've met people who have reared badgers and foxes, but hares cannot 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 judgment. 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.

Excerpted from Raising Hare by Trent Dalton. Copyright © 2025 by Trent Dalton. Excerpted by permission of Pantheon Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.