The bio on Chloe Dalton’s Instagram feed cuts straight to the chase: “I met a hare and wrote a book.” Yet as she set out on a chilly walk four winters ago, the author of Raising Hare: A Memoir (Pantheon, March 4) had no such plans. Trudging into the fields outside her home in the English countryside, she was otherwise preoccupied. “I barely noticed the landscape around me. My gaze was thoroughly overseas,” says Dalton, a foreign policy adviser and writer. “I would stomp around the fields just a bit cold and irritated, thinking about my work and focused on returning to London.”

Back in the city, Dalton’s suitcase was often half-packed for trips undertaken on a few hours’ notice. Working with public figures and politicians such as former Conservative Party leader William Hague, Dalton’s team addressed war, human rights, and crises in places such as Kabul and Ulaanbaatar. Yet by February 2021, a year into the Covid-19 pandemic, Dalton had been displaced to her renovated barn as work unfolded virtually.

On her walk that day, Dalton encountered an unexpected sight on the track that led from her home: a tiny brown leveret, or baby hare, sporting a distinctive white mark on its forehead, “like a minute dab of paint.” No wider than Dalton’s palm, the creature sat with its paws pressed together and ears pinned back. It was still there when Dalton returned hours later.

So begins the tender and quietly riveting tale that eventually became her debut memoir. While Dalton had written reams of copy for other people, from speeches to editorials, a memoir was not on her radar. “I always felt I would achieve more in the context of the people I was writing for and with rather than in my own life,” Dalton says during a recent Zoom call. “I didn’t aspire to be an author.”

At first, Dalton simply tried to keep the wild leveret alive. In between feeding it oats, she took a deep dive into the habits of “rare and secretive” hares (usually called jackrabbits in the U.S.), sending away for any hare-centric books she could find. Some focused wholly on cooking hares, and rabbits tended to dominate both Google searches and Leporidae-focused literature. Yet rabbits differ from hares in myriad ways, from size (rabbits are smaller) to speed (hares are faster) to nesting (rabbits burrow, while hares nest above ground).

“It was an animal that was completely outside my frame of reference. Everything about it was baffling and new,” she says of the leveret. As she read about the animal’s meticulous grooming habits and sensitivity to both smell and noise, the leveret often rested on a cushion near Dalton’s shoulder. Dalton began tiptoeing around her home during the day, keen not to disturb her “sensitive house guest,” who mostly slept during daylight hours.

As the animal grew larger and found its way into Dalton’s garden, she began observing its behaviors there, sometimes drawing diagrams. “Before, I’d always thought that drama and interest was in forces of war and history and conflict,” says Dalton. “There is so much drama to be found in a small garden, if you know where to look.”

Dalton began jotting down her observations on the day that the then four-month-old leveret leapt atop and eventually over her garden wall, one of several high-stakes scenes that keep the reader in suspense. Could the leveret survive its many threats? Would it disappear into the wild forever?

About a year after Dalton’s first encounter with “hare” (whom she never named), she was wrapping up a meeting with literary agent Caroline Michel on another issue when Dalton casually mentioned the unusual goings-on at home. “I said, ‘It was lovely meeting you, and one day I’d love to tell you about a story I might like to write.’” To Dalton’s surprise, Michel asked her to tell her on the spot. “I said it as an almost offhand comment, but it must have been percolating in my mind that I was having this extraordinary experience. Nine out of 10 people would have been far too busy and rushing onto the next thing, and they’d already given me an hour. She gave me that extra time, listened to me, and encouraged me to write. I feel very grateful.”

Dalton initially approached the book as she would her political writing: in longhand, jotted down in a notebook. She drew on her notes, diagrams, and immersive research, as well as the ongoing presence of the leveret, now a full-grown hare. “I had the great advantage that the hare was still with me. I tried to avoid touching her, but I could see her paws, her gestures, [the] fur in her face as it changed,” she says. “I think if I had written the book after the hare had gone, I wouldn’t have been able to write about it with the same immediacy. I wrote this book with a living, breathing wild hare stretched out on her flank a few meters from my desk.”

Dalton turned out a draft in about six months. She found it challenging, at first, to shift her mindset. “I was used to writing 800 words, the length of an op-ed, and to feel like I had said everything on the subject that I wanted to say,” says Dalton. Her editor encouraged her to let the story breathe. “In politics, a single word can make all of the difference. I was always expected to write about other people in their voices. It was different when I did it for myself.”

Since publication last September in the U.K., Raising Hare has garnered much praise; among other accolades, it was shortlisted for the 2024 Book of the Year by the bookstore chain Waterstones. The book has its U.S. release next month; in a starred review, a Kirkus critic calls it a “soulful and gracefully written book about an animal’s power to rekindle curiosity.”

While Raising Hare is rich with poetic detail and palpable affection, the book also explores the myriad threats hares face: foxes, buzzards, hunters, cars, and the churning blades of ploughs. (The creature’s numbers have plunged 80% over the last century.) By the book’s conclusion, many readers have likely, and unexpectedly, become hare advocates. Dalton’s Instagram feed, @chloedaltonuk, is an ongoing homage to hares, including the eponymous hare of the title—sporting a fluffy winter coat, falling asleep on a duvet, or bobbing its nose up and down.

“There’s this beautiful and unexpected irony that a creature who is totally silent and totally wild helped me to find my own voice,” Dalton says. “To write a story under my own name is a huge step for me and a joyful experience.”

While the author doesn’t yet have plans for another book, she seems open to it. “Part of the incredible gift and experience that this hare has given me is the possibility of telling her story, and being able to consider a life as a writer,” Dalton says. The creature has also helped her slow down, look more closely, and reexamine the “nervous tension and impatience” that suffused her life as a political adviser. “It was a revelation to me on so many levels that there was this opportunity to change lying in a place I would have never thought to look for it.”

Corin Hirsch is a writer in Vermont.