#26 in Adventure
Watership Down
- 478
- Pages
- about 9 h
- Reading time
- Film 1978 +2
- On screen
- Guardian Children's Fiction Prize
- Carnegie Medal
- California Young Reader Medal
- NPR Top 100 Science Fiction and Fantasy Books
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Our view
“Watership Down” turns a band of rabbits fleeing their doomed warren into a genuine epic, complete with its own language, folklore and myths. What holds it together is companionship under pressure, and some readers finish it reluctantly. It is long, and some find it wordy; it works as plain adventure as well as anything deeper. It suits patient readers who like a journey through wild country.
The view of the BookRank editors, written from readers’ ratings and comments. It does not affect the score or the book’s place in a ranking.
About the book
Watership Down is an adventure novel by English author Richard Adams. Set in Hampshire in southern England, the story features a small group of rabbits. Although they live in their natural wild environment, with burrows, they are anthropomorphised, possessing their own culture, language, proverbs, poetry, and mythology. Evoking epic themes, the novel follows the rabbits as they escape the destruction of their warren and seek a place to establish a new home, encountering perils and temptations along the way.
On screen
This book has been adapted for the screen 3 times — from 1978 to 2018.
Adaptation data: Wikidata · On screen →
Where the score comes from
The sources average 8.2 across 945 ratings. With that many, the reader vote carries 86% of the weight and the score stays at 8.1 — the Adventure average of 7.8 barely moves it.
| Source | Average | Ratings | Weight |
|---|---|---|---|
| Open Library | 8.3 | 107 | 11% |
| Google Books | 7.0 | 6 | 1% |
| Hardcover | 8.2 | 832 | 88% |
Frequently asked
How long is Watership Down?
It has 478 pages — shorter than 61% of the ranked books in Adventure.
In this book
Themes this book shares with others — each leads to the best books on it.
If you liked this
Same shelf — Adventure — with scores between 7.2 and 8.1, closest to this book.
