The Leveret
Moving to the countryside is supposed to fix Clare and Phoebe's relationship. A fresh start, a change of scenery, a chance to heal after the miscarriage of their baby girl.
Instead, Phoebe feels suffocated. Back in the rural community she ran from at seventeen and unable to face the partner she cannot help, she throws herself into work on the family farm. Clare is a stranger in the village, uninitiated and out of place. She spends her days drifting around the cottage, its walls groaning and shifting as she withdraws into a world inside her head.
One day, wandering through the forest nearby, Clare finds a leveret - her own little Isla. A surrogate to lick and love. A way to feel whole again.
But as Isla grows into an adult hare she becomes wild and unruly - a kicking, biting, scratching creature. With Clare's grasp on reality growing ever more tenuous, Phoebe begins to question whether Isla is the cure for grief Clare is searching for as she desperately clings on to the woman she loves…
With this bruisingly tender love story, debut author Anna Goldreich has conjured a hazy dream of a novel about the fantasies we create as a refuge from grief. The Leveret is a heartbreakingly gorgeous and lyrically haunting hymn to queer love and the power to rebuild from the wreckage of a relationship.
Bios
Anna Goldreich is a writer based in Norwich. She holds a Creative Writing Prose Fiction MA from the University of East Anglia and her writing has been shortlisted for the Bridport Short Story Prize 2022 and was awarded the Mslexia Short Story Runner-up Prize 2025. Her debut novel, The Leveret,was published by Hamish Hamilton in 2026. She is the co-founder of Queer Birders Norfolk.
Katie J Barlow is an artist, researcher and educator based in Norwich. She is undertaking an illustration PhD with Kingston University. The project explores the entanglement of textiles and comics as a generative framework for presenting embodied identities and nondominant social histories. This archival enquiry centres material histories in Norfolk with a focus on making by hand as a key site of labour, constraint and resistance.
Beadbinders is a collaborative project between Anna and Katie, which explores intersections between writing, textile practices and print.
Ticket price includes a free drink.
Mix of sitting/standing.
No accesible toilet.