As Chloe Dalton will tell you, rabbits of the cottontail, burrow-digging, Easter time variety are far different from hares. The face of the hare is longer, for one, and they are larger. They do not dig warrens but build nests under cover of tall weeds and grass. They are less commonly sighted than rabbits, due both to a preternatural propensity to make swift getaways at the first whiff of anyone approaching and to their shrinking numbers thanks to hunting and habitat destruction. This makes them so difficult to study as a species that, as Dalton embarked on the project of raising the day-old leveret (baby hare) she discovered by the road, she found that her experience of dwelling in close proximity to this small, wild thing frequently disproved the little she was able to find in books about their needs and habits.

Read our Q&A with Chloe Dalton, author of ‘Raising Hare.’ 

An erstwhile political advisor, Dalton had been cooped up alone in her country home during the COVID-19 pandemic when she found the helpless hare. In her magical, endearing memoir, Raising Hare, Dalton describes this rare experience of spending her days in a deep and unusual intimacy with one of England’s most wary and timid creatures. Reluctant to interfere with the animal’s innate wildness, Dalton hesitates to initiate too much contact with the leveret, or indeed even give it a name. But the tiny animal nevertheless extends its influence over Dalton’s entire world.

Dalton’s once jet-setting, busy life takes on the same quiet rhythms of the surprisingly companionable creature. Dalton describes sunlit moments of sitting quietly at her desk with the hare nearby, noticing the minute variation of nature all around her cottage and taking cues from her small friend in the project of slowing down. Her efforts, which include bottle-feeding the neonate, do not result in an adult hare that is tame but rather a wild animal that happens to hold a particular human in high regard.

Dalton’s memoir expands on the relatively little knowledge we have about this enchanting species, while also serving gentle commentary on the state of wildlife and the need to preserve their habitats. Lyrical and British in a way that, appropriately, echoes Beatrix Potter, Raising Hare is a sweet and curious meditation on what we gain when we allow the natural world to teach us.

On Memorial Day weekend in 2019, Geraldine Brooks received a life-changing phone call from a brusque hospital resident. Her husband of more than three decades, the writer Tony Horwitz, had died suddenly while on his book tour. In Memorial Days, Brooks describes the confusing and difficult weeks that followed: the rush from her home on Martha’s Vineyard to Washington, D.C., the sleepless first night, her reaction to his public obituaries and the headlong rush into the endless details that suddenly needed her attention. She intersperses these vivid renderings of grief’s early days with the story of her subsequent retreat three years later to Flinders Island, a remote island near Tasmania (Brooks was born in Australia) where she sequestered herself to finally, at last, grieve.

Brooks, who is the author of 10 books, including 2005’s Pulitzer Prize-winning March, paraphrases the writer Jennifer Senior, whose essay “On Grief” compares survivors of loss to passengers on an airplane that crashes on a mountaintop. The passengers emerge injured and each must travel down the mountain alone. This is the story of Brooks’ own journey down. With her in this dramatic and solitary landscape are Tony’s journals and books in which he’d written marginal notes, including Joan Didion’s acclaimed memoir about grief, The Year of Magical Thinking, which Tony, who was a judge on the National Book Award committee that year, found “name dropping” and “padded.” (Nonetheless, the book won the honor.) Brooks, reading his comments in her own moment of grief, wishes he’d given Joan Didion a break. “She worked in the movies; her friends happened to be famous. She can’t help that.” There is both humor and sorrow in these pages, and Tony emerges as an interesting and complicated figure, someone who loved life and was deeply driven. Brooks worries that his commitment to his final book, Spying on the South, accelerated his demise.

Tony has no grave. Instead, following his wishes, his ashes were tucked inside a baseball mitt and buried in the field where he played weekly ballgames. Memorial Days, a title which at once pays homage to the date of Tony’s death and the duration and purpose of Brooks’ solitary retreat, is another place of grief and memory. In its spare and direct pages, Brooks honors the writer, father and husband that she loves, and she offers her own story as a companion for others who are walking grief’s lonely path.