Watership Down

Watership Down is an adventure novel by the English author Richard Adams, published in 1972. It was the first novel he wrote, and after several publishers turned it down, Collings took the manuscript; the finished book went on to win the Guardian Children's Fiction Prize and the Carnegie Medal. It is set in Hampshire in southern England and features a group of rabbits whose society is described in as much detail as any human one.

The rabbits live wild, in burrows, in their natural environment, but they are anthropomorphised, and they have a culture of their own, with language, proverbs, poetry and mythology. Fiver is a young rabbit who sees the destruction of his warren in a vision, and his brother Hazel believes him when nobody else does, and the two of them lead the escape. A small group leaves before the men come.

They set out across a countryside full of roads, dogs, foxes and other warrens with their own politics, looking for a hill high enough to be safe. What they need is a place to dig, some does to build a colony with and a way past a warren that keeps its rabbits as property. Along the way the group tells and retells the stories of their folk hero, El-ahrairah, which are woven into the narrative as a second strand.

Adams wrote the novel from stories he told his daughters, and it became his best-known work. It is a standalone story with an epic structure, and it has been adapted for animation and television, and it is the book for which Adams is remembered.