What a swift odd turn his life had taken. A teenage girl with a ring in her nose was sliding ware into his drying racks.

What a swift odd turn his life had taken. A teenage girl with a ring in her nose was sliding ware into his drying racks.

Russell Bass is a potter living on the edge of Katoomba, in the Blue Mountains. His wife has been dead less than a year and, although he has a few close friends, he is living a mostly solitary life. Each month he hikes into the valley below his house to collect rock for glazes from a remote creek bed. One autumn morning, he finds a chocolate wrapper on the path. His curiosity leads him to a cave where three siblings – two young children and a teenage girl – are camped out, hiding from social services and the police.

Although they bolt at first, Russell slowly gains their trust, and, little by little, this unlikely group of outsiders begin to form a fragile bond.

In luminous prose that captures the feel of hands on clay and the smell of cold rainforest as vividly as it does the minute twists and turns of human relationships, Hare’s Fur tells an exquisite story of grief, kindness, art, and the transformation that can grow from the seeds of trust.


‘An enchanted tale about the power of making things and the unexpected remaking of a life.’
-Amanda Lohrey

‘With luminous prose and ephrasis, Shearston depicts the ubiquitously relatable challenge of handling change in everyday life. Hare’s Fur is a poignant story of the literal and figurative pottery of trust, friendship and new beginnings, dirty hands and all.’
-Jeremy George, Readings Booksellers

‘Hare’s Fur is a tale of convalescence, a restrained, moving story about how we discover new meaning in the wake of anguish … Hare’s Fur is about the inevitable reconfiguring of a life. It shows us that, like Kintsugi, the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with seams of gold, we too can mend ourselves, we too can reconnect our pieces.’
-Jack Callil, Australian Book Review

Trevor Shearston is the author of Something in the Blood, Sticks That Kill, White Lies, Concertinas, A Straight Young Back, Tinder, Dead Birds, and Hare’s Fur. His novel Game, about the bushranger Ben Hall, was longlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award and shortlisted for the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards, the Christina Stead Prize for Fiction, and the Colin Roderick Award. He lives in Katoomba, in the Blue Mountains.