Watership Down
Watership Down is Richard Adams's 1972 novel, originally invented as bedtime stories for his daughters during long English car trips. The book opens in a quiet warren on the Hampshire-Berkshire border, where the small, nervous rabbit Fiver receives a vision that the field they live in will soon be destroyed. His older brother Hazel, calm and unimpressive but trusted, persuades a handful of fellow rabbits to leave with them: the strong soldier Bigwig, the storyteller Dandelion, the inventor Blackberry, and a few more. Their journey across the chalk downs to a high, lonely hill called Watership Down is told with the seriousness of an Odyssey. Adams works in invented Lapine vocabulary, in stories of the trickster-hero El-ahrairah, and in the unsettling encounter with Efrafa, a militarized warren run by the merciless General Woundwort. The book is, by turns, a children's adventure, a study of leadership, and a quiet meditation on freedom.
Themes & atmosphere
What you might want to know about Watership Down
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
When the runt rabbit Fiver foresees his Sandleford warren turned red with blood, his older brother Hazel leads a small band of rabbits including Bigwig, Pipkin, and Blackberry across the Berkshire downs in search of a new home.
It is often shelved as middle grade, but the violence and loss are real. Many adult readers consider it a literary novel with rabbits as protagonists.
Yes. A traumatizing 1978 animated film and a more measured 2018 Netflix/BBC miniseries. Both retain the bleaker passages of the book.
There are deaths and intense passages, but the arc is ultimately one of survival and the founding of a new home. It is more bittersweet than tragic.
Watership Down was written by Richard Adams, published in 1972 by Oneworld Publications.
Watership Down is 478 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, Watership Down takes most readers 7 to 10 hours to finish.
Watership Down is a standalone novel by Richard Adams, not part of a series.
Watership Down is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.