Bitesize episode - Raising Hare by Chloe Dalton - Books & Chat: Short Book Reviews & Literary Discussions

Hello, and welcome back to Books and Chat. I'm Christina Young, and this is the podcast from Gloucester Book Club where we take a closer look at the books that we've been reading together. This month. We're talking about our February pick and it's Raising Hair by Chloe Dalton. This is not a fiction book. This is one of our non fiction choices for this year. It's a gentle and very beautifully observed memoir about lockdown life in a remote cottage somewhere in England. And in this remote cottage somewhere in England, Chloe Dalton finds this tiny baby hare a leveret.

And it's about how she raises this Leverett through these strange suspended months. So it's very much a story about care and solitude and the unexpected connections that carry us through uncertain times. So let's get into it. So when the world shut down, Chloe Dalton found herself living alone in this small cottage and the pace of life slowed to something pretty unfamiliar. I'm sure most of us will remember this. The days stretched out ahead of us, the silence settled in, and the natural world, the weather, the lights, the birds on, the movement of animals became the main rhythm of her days.

It's in this quiet, stripped back landscape that the story begins. One day, while she was out walking near the cottage, Dalton comes across this baby hare, the leveret, lying alone in the grass. It's still it's very cold, and it's clearly far too young to survive on its own. But she hesitates, knowing that wild animals are usually best left undisturbed. But this one is different. It's clearly orphaned, it's clearly vulnerable, and it's clearly in trouble. So that moment, the decision to pick it up and bring it home, becomes the hinge of the whole memoir.

I mean, it's not a rescue. She sought out it. It's something that just happened to her and something that arrived uninvited. And yet it was utterly transformative.

So once the Leverett's in her cottage, Chloe Dalton enters this steep learning curve. She's got no training, there's no manual and no one to ask. And she just relies really on instinct, observation and and the odd frantic search for information on the Internet. And actually there was very little about caring. Well, in fact, there was nothing about bringing up or caring for a leverer. And actually the information that was there pretty much said that the Leverett wasn't likely to survive. So she she also writes in the book about warming the hair against her own body.

She made this kind of makeshift nest for it, and she was having to bottle feed the baby hair every few hours. She also watched for any signs of illness and stress. And she also learned that the hair has this natural sorts of rhythms. It the hair is not a pet. It behaves like a wild animal who happens to be living indoors, and her care is always shaped by the knowledge that she's preparing it for its release, not ownership. And she pretty much does that throughout the whole book. She never names the hare, never gives it a pet name.

She tries to keep it as wild as she possibly can. She never cages it. It seems to have the run of the cottage and in that time it also destroys some of her furniture by sort of eating into her settee as her hair grows stronger. So the cottage just becomes this shared space. She observes and describes the hair's behaviour with a mix of humour and almost reverence really, the sudden bursts of speed that it does across the floor. It's hiding in corners and it's kind of re reappearing with boldness and it drums its feet and it's got twitching ears and it's constantly alert and it's really curious about the world beyond the windows of the cottage.

And that becomes a recurring thread. So those scenes that she describes really beautifully capture the strangeness of lockdown. Human life is paused while the natural world just carries on with its own energy and instinct. So Chloe Dalton's writing is rooted in close observation. The hair becomes a way of turning into the land and tuning into the land, the weather and the quiet details of the countryside. She's got to nurture the hair, but she's also got to resist the urge to tame it. And the memoir becomes a meditation on loving something that you know you must eventually let go.

And that's something that I think would have been extremely hard for her because although she hadn't tamed it, although the hair was not her pet, I think the affection that she felt for the hair, the bond that she created with the hair, it would have made it really difficult for her to let the hair go. The lockdown magnifies everything as well. So the silence, the uncertainty, the introspection that we probably all remember to an extent. So the hair becomes a grounding presence, so giving shape and purpose to her days.

And I certainly felt when I was reading the book that she needed the hair as much as the hair needed her. And the hare's life, certainly in the first few weeks of the time that Chloe was caring for her, the hare's life was really precarious. So every day, I think, felt like a small victory, keeping this creature alive. And Chloe Dalton writes honestly about the fear of losing it and the courage of just continuing anyway.

Chloe Dalton is a political adviser and a speechwriter by profession, and she's someone who is used to fast-paced work, very tight deadlines and high pressure environments and raising hair marks. Her shift into nature writing and memoir, and it's been really widely praised. It won the Wainwright Prize for nature writing, and it became both a Sunday Times and a New York Times bestseller. So her background, I guess, shapes the book in three ways. So the clarity and precision in her writing and her prose, A reflective, analytical approach to her own solitude, and a really deep curiosity about instinct, human and animal instinct.

I mean, when I say that.

So why does this book resonate? Well, Raising Hair taps into something universal, this desire for connection during a time of profound disconnection. And it's a story about care and vulnerability and the grounding power of the natural world. I guess so. Readers often respond to the intimacy of the animal human bond, the gentle humour in the hair's antics, and the emotional honesty of Dalton's reflections and the sense of hope that's threaded throughout this uncertainty. For me, when I read it with my book club, it's a book that lingers, and it's not because of dramatic events either, but it's because of the quiet, transformative relationship at its centre.

This really is a book about stillness and quiet and peace to a large extent. There's also a lot of detail in the book about hairs. I certainly learnt so much from reading this book that I never had a clue about hairs and I would really recommend it just for that. Actually, I think she has probably added to the world's kind of information about hairs just by bringing up this tiny creature and it's a happy ending. It's not a really sad ending, so you need to be worried, as I was throughout the book, that something was going to awful was going to happen to this hair.

So it's quite a nice ending. And so with our book club, when we discussed it in in this month, actually, we've been talking about it. We've most of us have really loved this book. And the people who have not been so attracted by it really, or persuaded by it were probably people who felt that maybe the book was a little bit padded out with a lot of statistical information about hairs details, which personally I found really, really interesting to read, but it might not be for everyone. And the book has got just a wonderful, beautiful jacket cover.

It's it's a beautiful illustration of a hair. And also, if you go online and look at Chloe Dalton's website, you can actually find some wonderful photographs of the hair right from when it's tiny, it's a little baby up until it she becomes an adult hair and goes off on her own journey. So I would really recommend this book to anyone who is looking for a gentle, beautiful read about this very shy creature, the hair. So that is all for this episode of Books and Chat. You can listen to the podcast wherever you usually get your shows.

And we'll be back next month with another discussion about one of our book club reads, which will be a fiction, will be back to the fiction. In the meantime, please do keep reading. Bye for now.

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