The Mare

Fascinating, compelling, extraordinary … It explores how an ordinary woman could descend so quickly into evil and also the role played by government propaganda, ideology, fear and cognitive dissonance * BBC Radio 4, Woman’s Hour *
Uncompromising and supremely disquieting. [The Mare] is chilling as a portrait of an ordinary woman’s all-too-easy descent into inhumanity * Prospect *
Many books purport to explain how apparently harmless people became monsters under the Third Reich, but I’ve never read one which comes this close to demonstrating exactly how that can happen… Hampshire writes so deftly it is hard to believe that this is her first novel… A clever, dark story which is not for the faint-hearted * Spectator *
Slowly, slowly, you are drawn into the nightmare, until unspeakable horror becomes everyday routine. This is a story so profound and yet so readable, I can only stand in awe of Angharad Hampshire. A landmark book – Rory Clements, author of ‘Evil in High Places’
Ingenious and thought-provoking, The Mare has the quality of a nightmarish fable, a continuous battle between deception and self-deception, rocking back and forth in time through the eyes of its protagonists – Derek Niemann, author of ‘A Nazi in the Family’
[A] haunting debut novel… [It] offers nuance through shifting perspectives, highlight’s humanity’s violent capabilities and concluding that the true horror is found not in the reader’s similarity to the victims but our similarity to the perpetrators * Gazette & Herald *
A brutal, brilliant novel. Angharad Hampshire’s precise storytelling moves us in steady increments towards inevitable horror, forcing the reader to question both our conception of the monstrous, exceptional ‘other’ and the reliability of our own moral compass. Genius – Karen Powell, author of ‘Fifteen Wild Decembers’
As absorbing as it is deeply unsettling. Hampshire’s debut novel sharply observes the horrific path from humanity to cruelty and the tragic results of dehumanisation * The Crack *
A powerful and uncomfortable read * Prima *

Angharad Hampshire was born in Manchester in 1972. She has worked as a producer for BBC Radio 4 and the World Service in London, an honorary lecturer in journalism at the University of Hong Kong and a regular contributor to the South China Morning Post. She holds a Doctor of Arts in creative writing from the University of Sydney. Angharad is a lecturer in creative writing at York St John University and lives in York with her family. The Mare is her first novel.

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