At the same time, the major events, when they come, have been so far telegraphed in advance that they don’t really have much impact. We follow a woman who moves into a cottage on the estate of a formally grand Scottish manor and begins to get to know the inhabitants of the main house. As the story goes on, you learn more about what made the woman lose her job as well as the mysterious past of the people who own the property.

I was willing to endure a certain amount of ambiguity in the hopes of seeing how everything came together at the end, but it just didn’t? Sally Hinchcliffe was born in London but grew up all over the world in the wake of her father's diplomatic career.Plus the fact that I didn’t go in expecting it to be wonderful made it all the more pleasing that it is, in fact, wonderful. The opening image of the hare, run over by a bus, dying a lingering death; the hares, stuffed and posed, in various tableaux in Hare House; the hares running alongside our narrator by the roadside. After the death of their parents and brother, only two now remain: Grant, the relatively young (‘not yet thirty’) master of the house, and Cass, his capricious teenage sister. The writing itself the author did a great job, but, it left me confused and wondering what I’d just read. Yet the cold left me feeling alive, as if we were indeed the only things out there that were still living, the only things moving in the whole landscape.

It’s just a little too open-ended, a little too conventional and a little too culturally conservative for my taste. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average.The idea of this book had me really excited to read it as I love a witch story but this novel fell flat for me. I think it was made fairly clear what happened at the narrator's school and why she moved to Scotland. The premise and title, teamed with a direct comparison to Andrew Michael Hurley in the blurb, made me fear it would be derivative; what with the isolated country house and the hare motif, I thought it might be too similar to Starve Acre. She relates her experiences solely from her own perspective and gives every appearance of being an unreliable narrator.

The words Exod 22:18 appear in inscriptions throughout the setting – Exodus Chapter 22, verse 18 reading “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live”. There is also an array of animals threading their way through the story including, of course, hares. Nothing is really explained, a lot of things just fall into the void, and what is implied to have happened would contrast with everything we’ve read up to that point, making the whole thing even more confusing. She develops a prickly relationship with her neighbour, Janet, and a growing friendship with her landlord, Grant, and his somewhat flighty sister, Cass. My difficulties with this were partly linked to the fact that the tension between the psychological and the supernatural wasn’t resolved in a way I found particularly convincing, and partly to the representation of older and/or single women which seemed quite stereotypical.It seems for a while she’s to be a positive influence but dangerous secrets and an impending snow storm will soon complicate things. The main character, a woman trying to leave her past behind as a mysterious event led to her losing her job in London, had all the cards to be an interesting, complex character but ended up being quite flat for me.