The Leveret, Anna Goldreich's debut novel, opens with a birth that ends in silence: a late miscarriage that leaves the protagonist, Clare, devastated and unable to move on. Six months later, she remains stuck, waiting for the cry that never came, while her partner Phoebe seems impatient for her to recover.
A drastic move to the countryside
In an attempt to change their lives, the couple relocates to a rural cottage in the village where Phoebe grew up. Phoebe occupies herself helping her parents with lambing, while Clare sits indoors, unable to eat. Pregnancy had given Clare a sense of physical reality for the first time, pulling her from a "floating head" existence into a fleshy awareness. After the loss, she feels unreal again until she discovers an abandoned baby hare under a hedge.
A second birth
Goldreich writes the discovery scene as a second birth, full of pulsating life. Clare reaches through thorns, feeling softness, and pulls the hare up to meet her. She licks the hare's face clean, just as she did with her stillborn baby, and feels drawn back into life. The scene is written with absolute conviction, making the bond between Clare and the hare, which she names Isla, eerily moving even as it grows disturbing.
Multiple interpretations
Goldreich keeps three possibilities in play: the hare as a symptom of mental illness, as a desperate but sane attempt at self-cure, or as a means to access the truth that humans are creatures needing contact with the earth. For weeks, Isla sleeps in Clare's arms and is carried in a sling. As Isla grows wilder, Clare clings to the delusion that it's mere rebellion, trapping the hare in domesticity, tracking its height on the doorframe, and referring to her mother as Isla's "granny".
Narrative structure
The novel alternates chapters between Clare and Phoebe, though Phoebe's sections lack the same flight. Phoebe's love for Clare is affectingly halting, but frequent line breaks feel uncertain. Despite this, Goldreich excels at bringing the miscarriage and Clare's relationship with the hare to visceral life, making this a triumphant first novel. The need for new models of nature animates much writing today, and Goldreich's approach is mischievous and undogmatic.
Resolution and ambiguity
Ultimately, Phoebe must claim Clare back for human love. The book leaves ambiguous whether Clare saved the hare's life or blighted its chances, but Isla restores some physical reality that motherhood promised. In a moment of extremity, Phoebe lets out a strange cry from the depths of a poor creature, allowing a moving realisation of mammalian physicality in their love. Lara Feigel, author of Custody: The Secret History of Mothers, praises the novel. The Leveret is published by Hamish Hamilton at £14.99.
