By Richard Adams
A few rabbits leave a doomed warren and cross miles of open country to find a safe place, with something waiting to kill them at nearly every step.
Fiver is a runt with a knack for sensing what's coming, and one evening he stands in the field and knows the whole warren is about to be destroyed. The rabbits in charge won't hear it. So his brother Hazel gathers the handful who believe Fiver — Bigwig, a hulking warren guard, among them — and they slip out after dark with no plan beyond getting away. The book is the journey that follows. For a rabbit, a few miles of English countryside is a whole hostile world: a river they can't get across, woods full of things that hunt them, a warren of sleek well-fed rabbits who have everything and won't explain why, dogs, a cat, a snare or two. And then Efrafa, a warren run like a prison camp by a rabbit named General Woundwort, who does not let anyone leave alive.
Everything else in this genre grew out of this book. The clans of animals with their own warrior codes and creation myths and private words for what humans do — Warriors, Redwall, Ga'Hoole — all trace back here. Adams gave his rabbits a real language (Lapine), a religion, a trickster god, an army, and a hundred true small facts about how rabbits actually live, and he never once let them turn cute. A child who has spent years inside animal-clan stories and is ready for something longer and denser will feel the pull fast. It's the most demanding book on this shelf, and for a reader who wants that, the difficulty is the draw.