Watership Down

Richard Adams's Watership Down is an epic animal adventure for 10 year olds about a small band of rabbits who leave home because one of them has a terrible feeling.

What happens

Fiver is the smallest rabbit in the Sandleford warren. He jumps at bluebottles. But one May evening he finds a new board by the gate and starts to shake. Something very bad is coming, he says. They all have to leave.

(The board, if you're wondering, says the field is going to be built on.)

His big brother Hazel believes him. The Chief Rabbit doesn't. So Hazel and Fiver slip away one moonlit night with a handful of others. There's Bigwig, big and brave and quick to lose his temper. There's Blackberry, the clever one, and Dandelion, who tells the best stories. And little Pipkin, who's frightened of pretty much everything.

What follows is a proper journey, through a wood full of strange noises, past a striped creature with blood on its lips, to a river none of them knows how to cross.

The thing that makes it so special is that it really is a rabbit's world. They have their own words for things, their own stories, and their own hero, El-ahrairah, the Prince with a Thousand Enemies. When Dandelion tells a story in the dark to settle Pipkin down, you're right there in the ferns with them.

It isn't a gentle bunny book, though, and that's worth saying plainly. The rabbits fight with teeth and claws. There's blood, and Hazel tells the captain who's come to arrest Bigwig to go or be killed. Fiver's visions are frightening too (he sees the field "covered with blood"). The writing is long and old-fashioned in places, each chapter opens with a quotation from Shakespeare or an old play, and there's one old phrase about race that really jars today.

So it suits a confident reader who loves animals and doesn't mind a scare. A more sensitive child might be better sharing it with a grown-up, or saving it for a year or two. If you're not sure, reading the first few chapters together is a good way to find out.

For the right reader, though, it's a real adventure to get lost in.

What to read next

If they'd like another hillside full of rabbits waiting to see what the humans will do, try Rabbit Hill. It's a much gentler story, and everyone on the Hill is hoping the New Folks moving into the Big House will be planting Folks.